Far Cry 5 Doesn’t Understand The Country Life

The exploration aspects of the game, which are vital to the experience of hunting and gathering resources, as they allow the player to take the scenery at their own pace, also leave something to be desired. While I’ve seen additions to these elements of Far Cry praised as an improvement, I’m not impressed. The new icons for the locations of key collectibles are helpful, but they’re also revealing. The game wouldn’t need them if each location were a compelling area to search and spend time with in the first place. The radio towers, meanwhile, were removed from the game specifically to encourage players to take the information they need from their surroundings and interact more with the NPCs in order to foster a sense of community. And yet, the game doesn’t ask the player to really value the people they’re supposed to be defending. Characters who reveal nearby stashes and locations can be slaughtered without mercy at any minute. Of those you meet, few are given any substantial dialogue or back story. They’re never more than a helpful stranger at best, encouraging a sense of detachment.

It may seem unfair to zero in on the hunting specifically when the experience hasn’t changed all that much from Far Cry 3, Far Cry 4 and Far Cry Primal. But that’s just it. There’s no challenge anymore. The actual hunting process itself is stunted by repetition; it’s nothing we haven’t seen in the three games that came before. There’s always a snake that will hiss and lunge and a bird of prey that will dive and attack, and neither will provide a hide that you can sell or use as an upgrade. There’s always an aggressive, large animal that will charge and run you over, like an elephant, rhino or bison. Deer and wild boar provide bait, predator cats can be seen sneaking and pouncing from the tall grass, and wolves or coyotes or dogs roam the hillsides. Sometimes there’s a territorial flightless bird like the turkey or cassowary. Do all the world’s animals really boil down to this rough handful of types and behaviors?

But in terms of adapting the game to a specific culture, there was so much potential overlooked. All the past times both legal and illegal that I remember from growing up in the country, either directly or by proxy, just aren’t there: tracking, poaching, baiting and trapping, climbing trees, kayaking, riding horses, rock climbing, whitewater rafting. There are certain experiences in the game that I identify with, like fishing in camouflage hip waders, riding ATVs through dusty mountain roads and wondering if the dog that just chased a cougar into the bushes is going to come back alive. But those moments are betrayed by the lack of depth in the areas that are significant in terms of what country life meant to me. Far Cry 3, Far Cry 4 and Far Cry Primal, for all their flaws, facilitated a relationship between progression and land, tying together exploration and character advancement. The animals you found and killed as the story went on were roughly timed to coincide with the need for upgrades to ammo storage, establishing a pace for how quickly you opened up new territory. In Far Cry 5 however, those upgrades are tied to Perk points, and skins are only occasionally used in missions. Most often they’re just sold for cold hard cash and used to buy weapons. Outside of the bait that herbivores provide, you don’t use what you kill.

It’s just sad to play a game set in such a beautiful place that doesn’t actually value the land. While purging Hope County of its animals and plants hardly seems to be an expression of love in the first place, the process used to have a more practical purpose, one that made sense to me. White Americans may have an astounding ability to consume and exploit resources, but by now a lot of us know better than to become a one-person extinction event. And where I come from, you keep what you kill, you kill what you eat, and you don’t sell off stacks of skins like some kind of 18th century French trapper.

Ultimately, the rural American trappings of the game’s aesthetic are just set dressing; the mechanics weren’t created to tell a story, the story was written around the mechanics. Expecting more is, as the great Cher Horowitz said, like searching for meaning in a Pauly Shore movie. And while I may perceive the Far Cry experience to be wrapped around hunting and gathering, obviously the creators feel otherwise—the game really is, at the end of the day, about conquering outposts in the woods. But all the same, Far Cry needs this. There are so many shooting games out there, and few that offer a quality hunting experience at all, much less one that surpasses even the best Cabela’s Hunter games. And in the absence of good writing, this may be the only way to distinguish themselves from their FPS peers. In fact, it may already be too late—Horizon Zero Dawn has already inspired a loyal fanbase despite being a new IP. They have completely stolen Far Cry’s thunder.

Ubisoft has reached the end of the line in terms of reskinning the Far Cry series. The removal of some of its older conventions is not enough to keep the games modern and competitive with others in their class. And some of its new features are too dated or unnecessary to keep things interesting (a formal companion system should have happened years ago, if at all). If you want to maintain our attention, Ubisoft, play to your strengths. Lean into cultures you portray and give Far Cry an identity of its own.