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REVIEW: FAR CRY 5 (PS4, XBOX ONE, PC - PS4 VERSION TESTED)

3/4/2018

19 Comments

 
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Sigh. So, here we go then. Let's give Far Cry 5 a review. Regrettably, this isn't the review I wanted to write...

In case you missed it, I wrote an article last week expressing my bafflement at how many reviews I'd read - both by professional games journos and those on social media - which placed what I felt was undue critical focus on the game's somewhat woolly politics... and it backfired horribly. 

It might've been an issue of timing; thanks to the Kickstarter campaign for Digitiser the Show I'm suddenly more unpleasantly visible than I've been since my Teletext days, and there was a clear subtext of envy in some of the grief I got. I was blocked by people on Twitter, I lost backers on Kickstarter, and for the first time in a long time I vanity-searched my own name and discovered some people "hated" me and that I am "a prick".

Most of you are rational people, so you don't need me to point out what a ridiculous overreaction this is. I mean, I thought if anybody was going to be angry with me it'd be games journalists, as they were the ones who I most directly took the piss out of.

Still, I'm fairly broad-shouldered these days, and I can't say any of it has done lasting damage, but it nevertheless irritated and frustrated me. How can we progress as a species and a civilisation if we allow ourselves to become so entrenched in our views? Honestly, I despair.  

One of the most hilarious criticisms which came my way was that I was a "centrist". Ie; somebody who aligns with neither the left or right, politically-speaking. Which, absurdly, wasn't at all what I was expressing. I didn't state any personal political affiliation in the piece, merely my bafflement that anybody would've expected anything different from a Far Cry game than what we got.  
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KNEE-JERK, MOTHER BROWN
Unfortunately, we live in reactionary, knee-jerk times. Lots of people are on edge, looking for offence and attacks where none exist. That's not to say none exists whatsoever; we know full well about the swatting and the misogyny and whatnot, which might make some hyper-aware. It's entirely understandable.

But at the same time, if you've simply signed up to the cause because you liked the recruitment posters - if you're a foot soldier, not a victim - it's a mistake to be so aggressively inflexible. It ceases to be about the thing you're fighting for, and becomes about whatever is driving you personally. 

Too often it seems that if you take a step back and say something like "Woah there... maybe we should all calm down for a minute" you're labelled as the enemy. Is that wise? Really? Just think about it. If a vicar says he hates you and you're a bad person because you don't fancy going to church on Sunday do you think that's going to make you more or less likely to go to church?

No, because that vicar would come across as an extremist who is only capable of interpreting what they see, read and hear through the filter of their own confirmation bias. You'd think that vicar was unnecessarily horrible, and if it happened too often you might end up thinking all vicars are like that.

And who knows? If somebody from the Church of Satan then comes along and says "Man, vicars are the worst - why don't you come along to our coffee morning? We have free Wagon Wheels!" you might be more inclined to go.

Yeah, I know, weird analogy, but... do you see?

I don't mind saying that, traditionally, I've always been to the left-of-centre. I despise the alt-right, but at the same time, my psychotherapy training has taught me that everyone is an individual, and nobody follows a cause simply because they're "evil". The world is not that simple. It's not black and white. I wouldn't say I'm a centrist at all... but we need moderates to bridge ideological differences, otherwise all that happens is you get locked into a war of attrition. 

I've never voted Tory in my life, but one of my best friends was a Conservative counsellor. It doesn't make him a bad person. Most of my family voted for Brexit. Do I hate them because of it? Of course I don't. Does all that make me a centrist? Don't be ridiculous, but - candidly - I'd much rather be a centrist than someone at either extreme.

Of course, a lot of people in the "culture war" that's currently waging in the West have no intention of winning. They simply want to have their identity reaffirmed. Unfortunately, this isn't a traditional war. Keyboard warriors can't just drop an atomic bomb on their enemies to terrify them into surrender. 

Ironically, this I'm-right-and-they're-wrong mindset is precisely the fictional reality that you've seen played out in all the Far Cry games to date. It asks the player to decide, and make up their own minds.

Scary thought, eh? Free will... brrr!
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CRY NO MORE
Far Cry dumped you on a Pacific island in the role of an ex-special forces operative investigating illegal genetic engineering experiments. 

Far Cry 2 dealt with arms smuggling in central Africa. Set in a country gripped by a Civil War. The player finds themselves caught between the two warring factions, which are both depicted as equally ruthless. The player must assassinate an arms dealer who has been selling weapons to both sides - achieving your aims even if you must succumb to the same immoral tactics as your enemies.

Far Cry 3 was set on another tropical island, with the player assuming the role of an American tourist, caught in the middle of another civil conflict, pulled left and right between differing perspectives. 

Far Cry 4 was, reportedly, inspired by the Maoist insurgency in Nepal, and the ending is entirely dependent upon which faction the player aligns with.

Point is... the Far Cry series has always been woolly and muddy with its politics and morality. The games don't really exist to make a point; they play out against backdrops inspired by real-world events, and give the player the freedom to play as they wish, and side with who they wish. Equally, you can play them as a big, brash, tongue-in-cheek, high-octane, Michael Bay-style shooters. Or just drive around looking for the best hunting spots.

Far Cry 5 is no different... except that it's set more firmly in a world which most of us recognise as our own, and right now that world is more polarised than ever. This is why, I suspect, there have been questions raised over its lack of commitment to saying any one side is right or wrong.

​Nobody wants to be faced with being told they're incorrect, so they're looking for evidence that they're right. When that evidence is lacking it clearly jars. Cue - and here's that word again - outrage. ​
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BOLD CHOICE
Admittedly, Far Cry 5 being set in present-day America, against a back drop of white supremacy, religious cults, and Big Government, is the only really bold choice here. The rest of the game plays much like the past three or four Far Cry titles.

What it does do, however, is succeed in streamlining the formula. Gone are the towers you'd need to climb to unlock new missions and areas of the map; you now get new things to do by exploring, stumbling across new locations, speaking to people you encounter, and reading notes. It makes the game more naturalistic, flowing from one mission to the next entirely at the discretion of the player. 

Additionally, crafting has been stripped back to basics, hunting is less essential, and there are "prepper stashes", which are like sort of platform-game puzzles, where you have to work out how to get to them. And you can hire soldiers as back-up, or win specialists - a bloke with a plane, a bloke with a bazooka, a bear etc. - to join you in battle, and it makes for a subtly different sort of game.

And I love it. It's bloody great, an astonishing technical achievement, and whatever you might think of the story... it's hard to argue that it doesn't succeed in being anything less than democratic in allowing the player to choose how they play.

If that wasn't enough, there are multiplayer modes, and the arcade mode - essentially Far Cry's answer to Mario Maker - which, I confess, I've barely scratched the surface of. 

Oh... it seems that I've written a review which contains little more than a review of the reaction to an article I wrote criticising the lack of focus on gameplay in other reviews.

So there's another label you can lob at me along with "prick" and "centrist": hypocrite.

​SCORE: 9 lost Kickstarter backers out of 10
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19 Comments
RedDog
3/4/2018 10:14:08 am

Jesus, these people who cry bloody murder if a game comes out and doesn't have a clear political message in their favour. If you want that sort of thing, those games are already out there!

Keep doing what you do Biffo, personally I'd only stop backing you if the quality of your output dropped, not because you have an opinion I disagree with.

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Nobby
3/4/2018 10:29:52 am

Love you Biffo!

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Drunkndandy
3/4/2018 11:13:28 am

You ok hun?

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Spiney O'Sullivan
3/4/2018 12:09:36 pm

Faced with the simple choice of scoring the game an 8 or a 10, Biffo chooses to appease both sides by going down the middle with a noncommittal 9. This is the kind of appalling centrist behaviour we've sadly come to expect from this publication.

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David W
3/4/2018 03:04:14 pm

A true centrist would have awarded 73%. I am canceling my subscription.

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Spiney O’Sullivan
3/4/2018 03:18:32 pm

What? It’s clearly deserving of a 10! I’m cancelling my subscription to your comments and preemptively pulling my funding from any kickstarters you may do.

Wadaload
3/4/2018 01:07:42 pm

I see the irony in writing a review of Far Cry 5 which discusses the feedback on a review of the reviews of Far Cry 5, making this a review of the reviews of the review of Far Cry 5 which also contains a review of Far Cry 5.

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Mr Biffo
3/4/2018 01:15:30 pm

Yes. Well done. Hence my final couple of sentences.

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Wadaload
3/4/2018 02:04:13 pm

Is this also why the first picture in the article shows a person using a bow-and-arrow against an aeroplane while a man weilding a rocket-launcher tentitively aims at someone in the distance, and why the second picture is a fish?

Mr Biffo
3/4/2018 02:07:30 pm

Correct. Everything has a hidden meaning.

Joe
3/4/2018 01:58:06 pm

FC5: I wish they would do something about the spawn rate for NPCs and the bullet-sponge wildlife. It's relentless and I find it kind of immersion breaking and it needs to be turned down or at least give people the option to do so. Never had this problem with FC3 or FC4 Anyway, carry on the good work, Mr Biffter.

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Anywherebuthere
3/4/2018 02:51:43 pm

Don't worry Biffo, the Internet is a toxic place. Face it, most people who need to make their opinions known on the Web are wrong and have some sort of inferiority complex. Don't let them get you down.

I never really got into Far Cry 4 despite trying, but this does look decent! Thanks for the review.

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Reverend Jim Jones
3/4/2018 06:20:36 pm

Colin Moriarty did a great video about this issue on his "Colin's Last Stand: Side Quest" channel today.

He sums it up well at the start when he states that people are criticising alternate reality versions of the game that don't exist but that they wish did exist. They have been doing that since it was announced.

When games cost tens of millions to produce, their niche Far Left politics just won't cut it and don't have the wide spread appeal to shift enough copies. Not that they even realise that half the population don't share their political views as demonstrated by their shock every there is an election and they lose.

In my view the real game (and not the imaginary one the ideologues wanted) is one of the best titles Ubisoft have created for years. Well deserving of a 9. I find it odd that Horizon Zero Dawn (good game mind) got far more praise when really its quests are all extremely similar and basic versus a huge amount of variety and wild things you can do in FC5.

The real game has sweet FA to do with what the games media have spent the last couple of years talking about in previews.

For me it is based on the David Koresh/Waco incident and a couple of smaller incidents that have happened in more recent years. Apparently these millennial bloggers (they don't deserve the title of "journalist") were sucking their thumbs and defecating in their nappies when that incident happened so of course they were utterly clueless and it went straight over their heads.

Why am I not surprised they weren't even bothered to do the most basic research. Guess that is how it works in college these days. Wipe your arse with a piece of paper, hand the skid marked sheet to your lecturer and get a 1st class journalism degree because "it's the taking part that counts".

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S Hawke
3/4/2018 09:22:56 pm

I've only played Far Cry 2, but it did kind of have a anti war message. You were forced to kill over and over again for two factions that were pretty much the same, taking on missions that just seemed to make things worse for everybody. It was the equivalent of locking a kid in a cupboard until they smoked a pack of cigarettes, to put them off smoking for life. By the end of the game I couldn't bring myself to shoot anybody else. And I felt guilty for running over a zebra, to boot.

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Geebs
4/4/2018 03:17:10 pm

Far Cry 2’s moral message is that you should never turn your back on your enemy....because they’ll immediately respawn and blow your car up with an RPG.

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James Walker link
4/4/2018 12:07:18 am

As a devoted acolyte, I say fuck em if they can't take a joke!!1!

Mon the biff!

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Insincere Bob
4/4/2018 12:41:23 am

Ooh you filthy neutrals make my blood boil... think you're so smart with your fancy rational arguments and general unwillingness to engage in mindless conflict with others!!!!

It's almost like you think we're NOT all just barely evolved chimps flinging digital poo at each other whilst clinging to a dying rock flying through space... I mean talk about a superiority complex!!!!!

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oishiiniku
4/4/2018 08:56:56 am

This game is a lot of fun, particularly if you turn off as much HUD UI as possible and go sneaking through the woods with your AI companions, discovering landmarks and getting into firefights as you go. FC5's world really is one of the richest, most seamless environments I've explored in a game. The attention to detail is quite staggering and it's kind of a shame that a lot of players will miss most of this due to the tunnel vision that is induced by the UI in these open-world map-moppers.

The story is absolute nonsense (whether you subscribe to the idea of its 'controversy' or not) and I try to skip every cutscene or conversation that I can. Not only is the writing toe-curlingly 'edgy' at times (Jess's story about The Cook's atrocities was particularly bad) but tonally it jars with the mood of the actual gameplay so awkwardly. This disconnect between the story told in cutscenes and the one you tell with your actions is nothing new in open-world games. But I think that as the fidelity of these games increases and they look ever more serious and real, the contrasting nature of narrative vs game actions feels more and more pronounced. It's like flipping the channel back and forth between and episode of The A-Team and coverage of the Waco siege.

Lastly, I wish the companions were more human and likable. They're almost universally angry and shout 'badass' things like 'SHITBALLS!' with alarming regularity. It makes me think back to Half-life 2 and how believable the resistance fighters - and NPCs in general - felt by comparison. There was an amazing sense of hopelessness and determination in the face of adversity to the people of City 17. No game since has managed to imbue its background characters with the same level of subtle personality. As it is, when my companions bleed out in Far Cry 5 I don't feel any sense of responsibility (partly because I can summon them again in a few minutes!) and I wish I did.

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Keith
6/4/2018 09:06:03 am

A slightly crude comparison, but I think video games (or some of them) have to kind of be considered in a context that’s comparable to porn or something - we can be high minded about what we want from some things, but let’s be honest about some of our baser instincts and not pretend they don’t exist, blowing shit up in video games, and watching porn, are things that can be enjoyable whatever your politics. Sure, some games can and do do more, and that’s a good thing, and I love some of those games. But man, this game appeals to me so much more now I know it’s not taking a side and reassuring me that it’s OK for me to enjoy blowing shit up in this game because it’s been carefully thought through to be as politically sound as possible

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