Given the wide
range of review scores, not to mention my lukewarm response to Far Cry: Primal, I wasn't expecting to
like Far Cry 5 as much as I did in
the first few hours. Of course, what seemed to bother a lot of people was the
story; or the juxtaposition of the dark, serious tone of the story and the
almost wacky, "anything can happen" tone of the side missions and
gameplay; or the story's refusal to take a hard stance on the sociopolitical
causes and ramifications of a right wing Christian cult staging an armed
takeover of a county government in our current political climate. And there
isn't much story in the beginning.
For the first time in a Far Cry
game, the player character has no voice, no backstory, not even a name, so when
I was dropped into a tense situation: the arrest of Joseph Seed, leader of the
Project at Eden's Gate, it didn't inspire a lot of thoughts or feelings beyond,
"Joseph Seed looks like Matthew McConaughey with a man-bun—they have to
have done that on purpose, right?" Obviously, the arrest doesn't go as
planned, and then it's a mad dash through a forest at night/tutorial, including
an impromptu defense of a cabin in the woods and a car chase. None of that is
fun, exactly, but it got me acquainted (or reacquainted) with the ins and outs,
and it was over pretty quickly.
After that had played out, I was
fished out of a river by a mysterious stranger and woke up in the underground
shelter of—I shit you not—"Dutch Roosevelt," a man who sounds exactly
like T-Bone from Watch Dogs and looks
exactly like my grandfather if he'd gotten spooked by the 2008 financial crisis
and decided to go off the grid. Dutch was so impressed by how I handled myself
in those scripted tutorial sequences that he decided to make me the tip of the
spear in his ongoing effort to reclaim Hope County from the "Peggies"
(that would be P.roject at E.den's G.ate-ies).
This is where the game gets fun.
Dutch might have given me a little backstory, I can't remember, but essentially
he handed me some guns and a map, said, "Why don't you kill some Peggies
and blow some shit up," and ejected me back into the wilds of Montana,
where armed zealots lie in wait every fifty feet or so, gossiping about Joseph
Seed and waiting to unload their flamethrowers and belt-fed machine guns into
anything that moves; where packs of normally docile grizzly bears get into the
cult's hidden stash of ecstasy and start murdering everyone they see; where
simple, salt of the earth folk wait for a hero to rise, the type of man (or
woman, but I'm playing as a man because I'm a man and also because of unconscious
sexism, probably) they can count on to drive a stunt car through a series of
checkpoints while it's on fire, or steal back their late father's big rig—the
one with the battering ram and mounted machine guns—or fetch the decorations
for the annual Testicle Festival.
You know, listing that stuff, I'm
beginning to realize just how much faith Dutch is placing in me, especially
when you consider that I've never spoken a word to him. He doesn't even know my
name. I guess I just have a
trustworthy face.
Running (and driving, swimming, and
occasionally flying) around Hope County, helping people with their chores and
getting into pipe bomb fights with passing maniacs, I was reminded of how much
fun I had playing Far Cry 3, my first
in the series. I had less fun with each subsequent installment, despite the
fact that in terms of gameplay, the Far Cries are just very slight variations
on a strong theme. I can't identify what's making the difference, but whatever
fairy dust they sprinkled onto Far Cry 3
is back, and I was happy, at any given moment, just to be running across a
wheat field, picking off distant goons with arrows to the face and blowing up
the manure silos they were guarding. The side missions are mostly fun, too, and
the named NPCs are well-written and performed. After somewhere between three
and five hours, I was honestly befuddled by the lower review scores.
Then I made enough progress in the
story to get to the first major boss fight.
Actually, first I did a mission to
recruit a companion character named Nick Rye. Nick is a pilot, the third
generation to run his family business, with a very pregnant wife. The Peggies
stole his plane, and he wanted me to get it back for him. The plane was in John
Seed's actual compound, which was crawling with goons, so I held off until I
was nearly done with the region. When I stole the plane, Nick name on the radio
and talked me through a bunch of aerial maneuvers to make sure the Peggies
hadn't cut the brake-lines or whatever, and while I was doing that, he talked
about his family—his father and grandfather, his love for his pregnant wife and
unborn child, his struggle with the decision of whether to stay and fight for
what's his or leave to protect his family—and by the end, I was thinking,
"What a great mission!"
Then I landed.
Then I landed.
What had started as a
balls-and-dick-out, pedal to the metal action movie and resolved (or so I
thought) into a relatively quiet moment of introspective character-building
turned back into Rambo III. The
Peggies were swarming Nick's property! They were going to kill his wife and
burn down his house! HALP! So I got back to killing waves of cultists, made it
through a checkpoint or two, and got killed just as Nick called me to defend
the hangar. I respawned, hustled over to the hangar, and… nothing. There were
no bad guys there, no Nick, no nothing. So I restarted at the checkpoint…
nothing. I thought about restarting the game, but the flying part of the
mission, lovely as it was, took a long time, and I didn't want to do it over.
After about a half hour of fiddling, I gave up and went to bed frustrated (Michael
Scott told me to tell you that that's what she said).
I had already built up enough
Resistance Points (I'd explain, but who cares) to take on the final battle with
John Seed, so the next time I played, I bit the bullet, headed to Fall's End,
and went to the church, where I was hit in the face with a rifle butt and
treated to a five-minute cut scene. I awoke to find John Seed tattooing my sin,
"WRATH," onto my chest. After he inks it onto a sinner, he cuts off
the flesh with the tattoo, thus unburdening the sinner of their sin—easy peasey!
He'd already completed the process with the local pastor, and I watched him do
it to Nick Rye, whose sin was greed—because he didn't want the cult to steal
his sole source of income, I guess?—but when he was about to do it to me, I
grabbed the pistol the pastor had hidden in his Bible and shot off his ear.
This led to another gun battle, after which I jumped into a truck's turret so
that we could chase Seed down and kill him. I died in a rain of gunfire almost immediately,
the game reloaded at the point just after I'd climbed into the turret, and…
Nobody was around. No enemies, no
NPCs, and nobody to drive the truck. I tried to get out of the truck, but I
couldn't. I did a manual reload and ended up in the same place with the same
problem. So I quit the game and started the mission over, which was when I
discovered that the five minute cut scene of John Seed monologuing and cutting
off people's skin is un-skippable. I
used the extra time to fight the almost overwhelming urge to throw my Xbox in a
fire, and I managed to get through that dog shit turret sequence without
getting killed, which was when the game told me that John Seed was escaping in
a plane and I had to shoot him down. My total experience flying planes to that
point was the Nick Rye mission I couldn't finish (which'll become even more
frustrating in a minute), but I got in a plane and took off, figuring,
"How hard can it be?" After all, until this point in the middle of
this mission, Far Cry 5 has never
presented flying as anything but an optional activity, so it would be crazy to
make this more difficult than, like, a 3 out of 10.
It turns out that it's very hard.
I got shot down again and again and
again. I looked up strategies for the fight online and found that tons of other
people were having the same issue, and that most people had gotten past it by
calling in flying ace Nick Rye for assistance, which I couldn't do because the
mission had bugged out. After literally an hour of this shit, I went to a gun
store, put a grenade launcher in my inventory, let John Seed shoot me down, and
then shot him from my parachute with a grenade. I hadn't tried this earlier
because the game kept emphasizing that I had to shoot him down from another
plane. But now, at least, one of the worst missions I've ever played in a
triple-A game was over.
WAIT, WHAT?
John Seed also had a parachute, and
he happened to parachute down right on top of his underground compound.
"You have to kill him again!" the game told me. I landed in a crouch,
snuck up behind him, and shot him with the grenade launcher, just to be sure.
Success! Another cut scene! And now, it's finally—
Oh, hey, there's more.
John's "underground
compound" was a repurposed missile silo, and now that I had his keycard, I
had to go in and rescue another deputy. Working from the naïve assumption that
the game's designers would recognize when it was time to leave well enough
alone, I sprinted in like an asshole and got gunned down by the hundred
faceless goons still hanging around. I respawned outside of the compound with
the keycard in my hand, and all of John's guards up top respawned, too.
Mother. Fuck.
Over the next 346 hours (subjective
time), I fought my way to the bowels of the missile silo to rescue the other
deputy, fought my way back to the top of the missile silo to blow it up, fought
my way through fire and explosions and waves of bad guys to get to a helicopter
on the roof, and by the end my only satisfaction was that it was over.
That there are persistent
mission-breaking bugs in main missions on a console version of a triple-A game
at all is incredible, let alone this many. Kirk Hamilton wrote an entire
article about the turret bug, an article that was published on Kotaku, one of
the highest profile gaming sites in the world, two weeks ago. How does nobody notice and fix that?
But even without the bugs, that John
Seed "boss fight"—and all the accompanying nonsense—was the worst. One of Far Cry 5's greatest strengths is the sandbox aspect, and even the
parts that offer the illusion of freedom are basically on rails. I don't mind
the story aspect. John seed is well-acted (by Detective The Irish One from Castle, as I discovered after the fact),
and I find the Far Cry universe's style of pseudo-philosophical nonsense
consistently entertaining, if not necessarily thought-provoking. The fact that
I couldn't skip the cut scene after the first time fits what I'd expect from
the people who create Far Cry's pseudo-philosophical nonsense, but when it's
paired with the mission bugs it's almost unforgivable. Either this game was
shipped before it was ready or there's a fundamental disconnect between the
people making the game and the people playing it (or, going by what little I
know about video game production in the 21st century, probably some
of both).
As much as I like, even love, a lot
of the component parts of the game, I understand the mixed reviews now. If the
parachute/RPG gambit hadn't worked—had I not been lucky enough to have it work
on the first try—I would have quit, and I don't think I would have gone back.
Will this pattern of high highs and abysmal
lows continue as I travel north into Jacob Seed's region? God, I hope not.
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