Far Cry 5

Sadly, the game which unfolds around these interludes isn't half as enjoyable. The first instalment to be set in North America, Far Cry 5 is Far Cry at its least engrossing, clumsiest and most basic, though there's still just enough going on here to keep a returning fan involved.

The game’s missions flow together organically and let you shift from capturing a cult outpost using an array of explosives and guns to scaling cliffs in search of hidden caches of equipment and lore-filled collectibles. It fails, however, to meaningfully move beyond the rest of the series in merging the violence and chaos these experiments produce with the community of people scattered throughout its world.

Obviously, an ending can’t take away your experiences with a game. All the times I took an outpost down without triggering an alarm, or guided a missile into the wing of a banking plane, or just wandered into a meadow so beautiful it made my jaw quietly drop, are all safely intact inside my head. But an ending can shatter the belief that all those moments were building to something meaningful, a feeling so vital to actually caring about a world and not just treating it as a collection of well-crafted toys. Far Cry 5 destroys that illusion with one final, massive swing, and that might be its ultimate sin.

It’s time to visit Hope County and do… pretty much the same thing you do in pretty much every “AAA” Ubisoft game.

Far Cry 5 is an interesting game to play in 2018, and it’s easily the best the series has been since Vaas asked us if we knew the definition of insanity in 2012.