12 thoughts on Far Cry 5, a dumb game I can’t stop playing

I should know better than to love this game, but here we are.

1. I think we should all remember a few things about the Far Cry franchise before even thinking about the Far Cry 5, the fifth installment in the series. This series has twice used the ancient and beautiful culture of Polynesia as a cheap backlot set for bloody stories of kinetic, cartoonish violence. Far Cry 2 took place in Africa, which I only really remember because the game let you throw grenades at zebras. Far Cry 4 took place in a fictional Nepal-type country, complete with a Maoist rebellion. The best piece of political commentary in the game—or at least as close as it got—was when a CIA officer abandoned players on a snowy mountainside during a blizzard. Why? Because our government is bad too, man.
2. So in retrospect when Ubisoft announced that a Far Cry would take place for first time in the United States—and that it would involve some gun-loving Christian cultists, no less—it might have been naive to expect anything too profound. This is true even if people wanted something more out of the game, something for this particular moment in American history when a.) the topic of mindlessly violent cultists seems more relevant than ever, and b.) people playing those video games might really want a game to deal with something genuinely scary. It’s a lot to ask of any game, and especially a lot to ask of Far Cry, a franchise that uses its beautiful, exotic backdrops as impressive but disposable framing for explosions and cartoon violence.
3. In fact, it’s a good question to wonder if anyone would really want that. I’m not sure exactly when I realized how little I wanted Far Cry 5 to wrestle with the terrors of modern American political life. Maybe it was when Marvin Gaye’s “Sexual Healing” began playing while a bull mounted a cow. Maybe it was shortly afterwards when I had to set one of the aroused bulls on fire to complete the mission. It could have been when I spent fifteen minutes throwing bait into a camp, watching drugged cultists cuss and shoot at a mob of skunks who refused to leave them alone. Might have been when I bought a weaponized shovel with a smiley face on it to use in combat. Might have been when I found myself skipping monologues and saying out loud “whatever, boring psychopathic monologue and subsequent torture scene,” before immediately finding the nearest pipe and laying into brainwashed cultists while yelling “YOU TRYING TO GET THE PIPE???” to no one in particular.
4. A side note: The shovel really is the star of this game. Hit someone with it, and it works like a sledgehammer, and makes an extremely satisfying noise on contact. Throw it and it turns into a flying guillotine that for reasons unknown to science travels at 400 miles per hour for up to fifty yards. In most melee situations in the game, one shovel is enough to level a room full of groaning cult-zombies. In Far Cry 5, the main character can carry nine of them.
5. Getting really excited over a shovel is also a clue to where Far Cry 5 has its priorities. There is a plot. There is a religious cult led by Jared Leto, or Justin Bieber’s pastor, or Bradley Cooper in a pair of amber aviators. They’ve taken over a good chunk of Western Montana, where you—a rookie deputy Federal Marshal— wind up stranded after a failed attempt to arrest Bieber’s pastor. The opening of the game is as much plot as anyone who’s played a Far Cry game needs. There are missions, some of them funny, some of them just plain weird, and all of them brutal and filled with daffy, surreal violence. Sometimes the interchangeable cult members make long, boring apocalyptic speeches. They all look like hipster bartenders, and they all torture the Deputy, but even that’s lost its steam. The plot is not necessary.
6. Instead: Skip all that. There are things to play with, so many toys to mess with in Far Cry 5, without really worrying about the stupid, incredibly stupid, just beyond stupid plot. There is the godlike shovel-spear, the usual manic violence, and the new “Guns for Hire” partnering system allowing players to squad up with NPCs of varying talents and abilities. “Guns for Hire” in particular is a delight. With Grace, a sniper, taking down an outpost became a surgical exercise, while the nearly feral hunter Jess turned the whole challenge into the kind of stealth campaign I could never pull off singlehandedly. Sharky, a pyromaniac local, has a flamethrower. That’s it: He has a flamethrower, and everything catches on fire all the time if he’s on the team, and that is pretty much all one needs to know about Sharky as a character. In other words: He’s great.
7. Oh: There is a diabetic bear named Cheeseburger. Once befriended and bribed with fresh salmon, Cheeseburger will attack anything he is pointed towards. There is also a dog named Boomer, and a mountain lion named Peaches. I guess someone could use them if they couldn’t appreciate the bond that develops between an imaginary bear and its master in combat. Once Cheeseburger ate ten cultists for me and then came back for pets and a treat, I couldn’t choose anyone else as my partner. He’s even got a cheeseburger-patterned neckerchief! This is not a smart or subtle game, and it is not made for smart or subtle gamers. It is made for me, a dumb, unsubtle man with dumb, unsubtle tastes.
8. Far Cry 5 is also not made for leisurely gamers, even if there are a lot of really good things to do as leisure. Fishing in the game is genuinely fun. I enjoy doing it, and go back to it in between the inevitable animal attacks and random plane crashes that interrupt it. Hunting means a lot less in Far Cry 5—new abilities are unlocked through a Perks system now, and crafting new stuff is largely out of the game—but it is still a great excuse to wander around the beautifully rendered Montana landscape. It really is something to appreciate, even when Far Cry 5 insists that something, absolutely something has to be happening at all times. (See: Any time spent fishing or hunting is inevitably broken up by an ATV full of bloodthirsty cultists, or maybe interrupted when a fishing buddy is devoured by a cougar.)
9. The Montana environment really is a gorgeous sandbox to mess around in for hours. Hope County is cut with mountains, lakes, and farms, and dotted with loving little details like dust swirling around on the roads and the hum of bees left to go feral in their hives. The water effects especially give the impression that whatever Far Cry 5 cheats on at the macro level could be made up for by the little environmental notes that make Far Cry games such a pleasure at the micro level. The usual things that go boom are spectacular, but it’s the glint of rippled water in the sunlight and the sound of a fly hitting the water of a pond that make this something other than an an overgrown arcade game.
10. And that, after five games, is what Far Cry 5 is. I get that someone wanting something more could be totally and completely disappointed, I really do. Far Cry 5 not only refuses to give someone wanting something more anything of the sort, but openly retreats into whataboutism when confronted with the question of why large groups of people might decide to be insane for a while. When pressed, it reverts to the classic video game answer: Because they were drugged, i.e “because they were zombies,” and that’s why we have to hit them with shovels At its worst, most skippable moments, the game devolves into the glib nihilism of a crap South Park episode. All moral choices are bad, both sides suck equally, and the only real move is triangulating a cozy, numb spot between the two. Then a wolverine attacks out of nowhere, or a burning helicopter falls through the trees and crushes the Deputy, and we’re back to screaming, burning spectacle again. But it’s still a bad, dull move, and the biggest part in undermining any real emotional involvement in whatever the game calls a story.
11. And yet, despite knowing better, here I am. What other game gives me the rich, emotionally rewarding experience of walking through a field glowing from the sunrise, only to be getting attacked by a gang of malicious turkeys and then killed by an airstrike before I can show them who’s at the top of the food chain? Where else can I retreat from the stress of a workday by stealing a car in order to drive to a lake where I have to catch a legendary sturgeon called The Admiral, only to be ambushed by war truck-driving religious cultists high on something a lot like PCP? What other game knows to play “Barracuda” by Heart whenever I steal a battered 2002 Ford Mustang?
12. In sum, Far Cry 5 is a cheap, evil drug, and it knows it. The meanest trick the game plays is that it puts anyone still addicted to the unique, caroming violence of the game in it as a character. Like a diabetic bear trashing a fast-food restaurant’s dumpster, I’m still powerless against the appeal of such well-wrought garbage—even if it does bad things to me, and I know there’s more wholesome food out there. To paraphrase Flaubert when asked who the inspiration for Madame Bovary was: Cheeseburger, c’est moi.