Far Cry 5 Preview

Far Cry 5 Release date ,and review

Available March 27 on PS4, Xbox One and PC

Ubisoft knows how to create charismatic, iconic antagonists. We’ve had Far Cry 3’s Vas, Pagan Min in Far Cry 4, and now, in the Seed family’s leader, Joseph, we have perhaps the most captivating. At once absorbing, endearing and terrifying, ‘Father’ has the potential to be the driving force of the most exciting story in the series to date.

Buy Far Cry 5 from Amazon UK | Amazon.com

The trouble comes when this story takes a step back and Far Cry begins proper, and we get an experience we’ve had for years: a bombastic game where utter chaos is your ally. While this is undoubtedly still great fun, its familiarity can’t help but diminish your excitement after the gripping, fresh premise.

The Seed family’s introduction is superb. As a young deputy, you join the local county sheriff, US Marshall and another deputy sent into the Project at Eden’s Gate to arrest Joseph Seed, aka ‘The Father’. Arriving via helicopter in the dead of night, the Sheriff – intimately familiar with the Seed family and its influence across Hope County – is reluctant to storm the compound. The US Marshall, meanwhile, believes badge beats blind faith.

There’s an almost tangible sense of foreboding as the team exits the chopper. The cultists follow the group at a predatory pace, all armed to the teeth with machine guns, flamethrowers and bats. Dogs bark behind wire fences, chatter occurs all around as groups strategise our swift exit, dead or alive. Getting to the church, Joseph is delivering a sermon, which the Marshall gladly interrupts.

Joseph doesn’t resist, offering the player his hands, but with a warning: ‘they’ will not let you take me. The voice acting is once again stellar across the board, led by the incredible Joseph. I hang on his every word, and when he stops, I barely breathe until he speaks again. He really is the embodiment of a charismatic cult leader.

Naturally, all hell breaks loose, culminating in lives lost on both sides, and you’re forced to flee into the woods. This is where Far Cry 5 the game takes over, and as great as it is to play, I can’t help but yearn for more of the scene I just left behind.

It’s important to note that everything Far Cry 5 does, it does better than the series has ever done. Shooting feels sharper, more refined. Stealth now feels like a viable option that doesn’t inevitably lead to everything being on fire. You can now take down entire compounds without anybody knowing you were ever there – and that doesn’t mean setting a tiger loose to maintain anonymity.

It’s also a visually stunning game. On PS4 Pro, the fields of Montana bloom with lush greens, reds and yellows. Fires explode with a destructive beauty. There’s an excellent amount of detail across the board.

Mission design has improved too, with everything you do working towards building a resistance meter in each region of Hope County, to lower the influence the controlling Seed family member has on the area. The more people you rescue, compounds you take down or Eden’s Gate property you destroy, the more the bar fills and the greater your influence is in liberating the town from the cult. This means that, however you choose to play, you’ll be rewarded.

But it’s all very familiar. The one thing the game doesn’t do is steer you in any way back towards the core narrative, and this works to its detriment.

In my three-ish hours with the game, all I wanted to do was face the Seed family, and see so much more of the Father, but after that incredible opening 20 minutes, I never dealt with him again.

While I was having fun taking down outposts, driving around and killing cult members, finding little offshoot missions and enjoying the spontaneity of a chaotic world that Ubisoft is so good at, the prevalent thought was how much I wanted to be dealing with the Seed family head-on.

I wanted the game to play much more like Resident Evil 7, another game that created an amazing premise centred around a family that served as the focal point of the experience, the pre-eminent threat that I wanted to flee and never be too far away from in equal measure. It was a beautiful balancing act that’s achieved through having such superb lead villains. Far Cry 5 has created something similar in Joseph Seed, but from my experience with the opening hours it hasn’t capitalised on that to anywhere near the same extent.

This is such a shame, especially when my biggest highlight outside of the intro came in a narrative sequence against Joseph’s elder brother, Jacob.

Jacob is a military man, offered no pension and no support after being severely injured in the line of duty. He doesn’t truly believe in Joseph’s message, but Joseph has given Jacob a purpose through Eden’s Gate, and that’s enough for him.

As a military vet, Jacob is not to be trifled with, and so the mission plays out: you’re kidnapped and held in an undisclosed location, where Jacob leaves you in a room with two other captives, told to kill to survive. Grabbing a gun on the table and killing these two other men, it soon becomes apparent that you’ve been drugged, and what unfolds is an incredibly psychedelic military training drill reminiscent of the one seen in the opening of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. Except the enemies are actual people – albeit figments of your imagination.

It’s an incredible level that makes excellent use of Far Cry’s brilliant gunplay, vibrant colours unseen since Blood Dragon, and some solid platforming to boot. Again, it’s memorable because it’s different, which I wish was true for more of what I played in this preview.

Latest impressions

Obviously I’ve played just a small snippet of the final game, so there’s every chance that Joseph and his family feature far more prominently in Far Cry 5 – but based on that time, the ratio in which they’re present is way off balance for me.

The narrative setup and Joseph Seed are so brilliant they’re almost deserving of their own IP. So much of Far Cry 5’s promotion and presentation has focused on the story, and that’s because it’s so strong. This makes it even more disappointing how soon the story fades into the background and the familiar outpost battles, bear hunts and quest collecting take centre stage.