Just say yes. Eden’s Gate has arrived, not just in Hope County, Montana but also inside your head. Far Cry 5 is a story of a cult that has claimed some land in the north west of the United States. As you enter into the valley in an attempt to execute an arrest warrant, things soon go haywire and you’re quickly thrusted into the wilderness. Your story of survival in a hostile world has begun. This is Far Cry.

While you begin the game with just your bare hands, it doesn’t take long to get equipped with some nice weaponry. There’s a few fun melee weapons to play around with such as a shovel or an oar, and yes you can get your hands on a barbed wire baseball bat. Firearms are sorted into categories allowing for you to easily find the type of gun that you require when visiting one of the many gun stores around the world. There are, in fact, too many gun stores. Random bench set up at an outpost? Gun store! Dude walking in the middle of nowhere? Gun store! It’s easy to find places to buy weapons in Far Cry 5, but what’s not as easy is building your coffers.

There are two currencies in Far Cry 5, regular cash and silver bars. Bars are the premium currency that can be purchased using real money, however you can find a limited amount of it in-game, mostly in safes. For this reason, it’s a good idea to unlock the perk that allows you to lockpick. There’s no leveling system in Far Cry 5, but there are a lot of perks to unlock. The game cleverly rewards you with perk points for completing challenges by doing different things in the game. This means you’ll be enticed to use different weaponry and different methods to kill your enemies. Hunting and fishing will also become a necessity as you work towards unlocking the various perks that will not only make the later stages of the game easier, but also more enjoyable.

Hope County is scattered with Prepper Stashes which are an important asset to enhancing your gameplay experience. Certain NPC’s throughout the world will provide you intelligence on a nearby location that has a hidden stash. The Prepper Stash is rewarded to you after completing a basic puzzle, whether it be a trip through a haunted house or jumping through electrified water, the perk points, cash and weapons / ammo refills are more than worth the effort. Also, Prepper Stashes are literally everywhere and will often have you scouring a part of the map that you may have otherwise missed completely.

The main complaints people had about the Far Cry franchise’s direction have been somewhat rectified. You’re no longer required to climb a tower to get a better view of an area. Now, NPCs will give you all the information you need. The problem with this is you’ll find yourself talking to a lot of NPCs, whether it’s one being held at gunpoint on the side of the road by a cultist, or someone in an outpost you just cleared. Yes, outposts are still a thing in Far Cry 5 but you’re rewarded differently depending on how you go about taking one over, à la Ubisoft’s Ghost Recon Wildlands. The best way to clear an outpost is by stealth, but sometimes you’ll find blazing through one in a helicopter to be more satisfying. Outposts occasionally need to be defended as well, but the AI and targeting system tend to make this easy.

The AI in Far Cry 5 is very mixed. While sometimes everything will be appearing to behave realistically, occasionally you’re thrown a curve ball that reminds you that you’re playing a game. Your allies you can call in for help can still pretty much run around undetected for the most part (a disappointing thing we pointed out in Ghost Recon Wildlands), and both enemy AI and NPC AI sometimes behave in the exact opposite manner of how they should be depending on the situation they are in. Many of these can be seen in various YouTube videos so we won’t delve into it, but it will be refreshing someday to see an open-world Ubisoft game with intelligent AI as promised.

Far Cry 5 comes a little bit undone in its glitches and bugs. They’re not bad enough to make you stop playing the game but if you encounter them then it will leave a sour taste in your mouth. The worst one we encountered was during a story mission that involved a dogfight. The enemy plane traveled OUTSIDE THE MAP and in an attempt to follow, we were respawned several times inside the map. The pain didn’t stop here though. Upon destroying the enemy plane, the pilot ejected, and we collected him in true Rocket Chainsaw style with the plane’s propellers and he died. The “Mission Complete” message appeared, and the screen went black. Enter glitched cut-scene. Watching a cut-scene with the main character talking to the ground was both humourous and concerning. What happened? What was going to happen? Why were we experiencing this series of unfortunate events?

The cut-scene ended, and the screen went black. A gunfight started. We could hear a plane dropping bombs. Shellshock. A never-ending warzone. Now in Far Cry 5, you experience hallucinations and all kinds of weird stuff so something like this wasn’t exactly out of the ordinary – except this time it was. The game wouldn’t pause. Nothing worked. The only way out was to close the game client completely. Once the game was reloaded, it went straight to the story cut-scene which this time included the pilot of the other plane and everything was back to normal. A strange experience indeed! Other bugs included dodgy AI responses and weird death/dying animations such as the dog Boomer spazzing out on the ground spinning in circles, parachuting through the world if you open your parachute as you hit the ground. It’s nothing that can’t be patched out, but Far Cry 5 is definitely not a game we can call polished at launch.

Going past the main game, the new map editor in Far Cry 5 is something you’re going to want to check out. Named Far Cry Arcade, Ubisoft has created a sandbox environment giving you the tools to be as creative as you want to be within the realms of Ubisoft’s top franchises. You can find arcade machines in the main campaign that will let you jump in, otherwise you can access it from the main menu. There are assets from previous Far Cry games (including Blood Dragon), Assassin’s Creed, Watch Dogs and others, with more to come in the future – some Tom Clancy stuff would be nice! You can create your own single-player content to share with the community, multiplayer maps, or pretty much whatever you can think of. The customizing tools are relatively simple on PC, so too are the search features to find the kinds of user-created maps that might spark your interest. Ubisoft has created some maps of their own as well, and will continue to update Far Cry Arcade with ongoing support for the foreseeable future. Far Cry Arcade is where the longevity of Far Cry 5 lies, and we can’t wait to see what you come up with in it.

Where the game is polished though is its graphics. Having the pleasure of playing this game with an EVGA GeForce 1080 GTX FTW meant we could have everything on maximum settings in 1080p, which looked great. Ubisoft has, in recent times, produced two stunning open-world games in Ghost Recon Wildlands and Assassin’s Creed Origins, and Far Cry 5 builds further on this. The sheer amount of grass in the paddocks and wilderness is something we’ve been begging for in a game, and the way it blends into other types of environments such as water, a forest, or a field of flowers creates a seamless flow and immersive experience like no other.

Far Cry 5 appears to be fully utilizing everything that current-gen tech can offer in the visuals department, right down to textures on rocks, furniture, and other models throughout the world. About half the buildings are explorable, all of which are highly furnished and detailed throughout. Some structures are more intricate, like an abandoned ship that was turned in to a “Salvation” outpost for Eden’s Gate, and others will feel very familiar, like a prison which gave us The Walking Dead Season 3 nostalgia.

Far Cry 5 gives gamers exactly what they wanted from a new Far Cry game. The main boss, which is actually essentially a family of bosses, are a step up from Far Cry 4 and on-par with Vaas Montenegro from Far Cry 3 in terms of insanity. There’s a lot of one-on-one discussions with the cult leaders throughout the game that touch on interesting topics, some political, but you’ve got to remember that it’s all in the name of fun and there’s not an actual cult in Montana doing this right now… or at least that’s what they want us to believe.

A possible Game of the Year contender, Far Cry 5 is a must-have for any fan of action/adventure/survival/shooter games. The main campaign takes about 15-20 hours in a quick playthrough but of course there’s plenty more to do on the side. The complete package with Far Cry Arcade and the upcoming DLC packs set in Vietnam, Mars, and a Left 4 Dead style zombie pack means there’s plenty more to come. If you’re still undecided, perhaps wait and see what the community comes up with in Far Cry Arcade, as we believe it will be a future game-changer, particularly if it can attract some of the sandbox playground audiences away from games like PUBG and Fortnite.

Far Cry 5 was reviewed on PC using an EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 FTW Gaming graphics card, and other than the in-game launch bugs we experienced, ran perfectly with everything on maximum settings at 1080p.