Far Cry 5 was released on March 27 and it is the first in this series of very popular open world shooter games to be placed in America. In the Far Cry series, there is always a big bad psychotic enemy that an everyday American, the player, fights and defeats.

Far Cry 5’s villain is a fanatic Christian cult leader who calls himself The Father. Thus far, the the Far Cry series has been over the top in a somewhat comical way. In this game, it took a different approach.

Far Cry 5, from the first five minutes of the game, sets a very dismal and eerie tone. The game takes place in a fictional county in Montana, which the cult, known as Eden’s Gate, swiftly takes over. Hope county, the map, spans about 8.5 kilometers from corner to corner, making a fairly large open world game.

The map is just big enough to make it open and majestic, and it has such a dense concentration of things to do that you could easily see at least 40 to 60 hours of gameplay to finish the game completely, side missions and all.

There are even quite a few hidden easter eggs, one of which alluded to a widely known scary movie character and potentially many more.

Hope county is split into three different sections that are overseen by a lieutenant, who you must defeat to liberate the area of the cult’s dominion. The game features a huge assortment of tasks and missions spanning from catching a rainbow trout on a pond for a little old lady to blowing up helicopters with rocket launchers to driving semis and jeeps with machine guns attached to them.

This impressive diversity of gameplay helps to keep the game fun and interesting as the player goes through the game. This is a step up from many games because a common problem with games now is that they are so long and the maps are so large that they lose the players attention halfway through the playthrough. With a diverse gameplay, it is harder for the player to get tired of the game because it just isn’t as repetitive.

Another big plus to this game is that the entire game, excluding the prologue, is cooperative, so you can play with a friend all the way through the game. The only downside to this is that the secondary player doesn’t receive any mission progress or achievements/trophies whatsoever. This is extremely frustrating, especially because the player must advance through certain missions before unlocking the certain weapons and equipments.

This left a bad taste in my mouth due to Ubisoft’s advertising of the game as an extremely co-op friendly game.

One of the most talked about parts of the game is it’s arcade mode, which features a map/mission creator and a hub of player made content that operates almost like a social media platform with likes and dislikes. Players can make their own missions to challenge their fellow gamers.

This feature adds a potentially infinite amount of gameplay, as there will always be more content as long as there are still players making content. The quality of the content is a different story. Most of the player made missions are pretty terrible but can be easily filtered away to only see the top rated content.

The game is also full of bugs, which isn’t uncommon with these types of games. A lot of times with very large games, the developers don’t have enough time or resources to test every aspect of the finished product, so the best way to test it is on the millions of people who want to buy the game. Instead of hiring a big group of testers, people will pay them to test their game, then report bugs on various forums which they can later correct through updates.

I experienced a pretty nasty glitch that isn’t uncommon that basically forces the player to restart their game. This was very frustrating and again left a bad taste in my mouth about the game.

Despite these flaws, Far Cry 5 is a very good game. It offers a ton of content, fun and interesting gameplay, and a good plot. It’s chock full of social commentary, both in the form of well placed comical satire and in a dark plot about a fanatic religious cult.

In comparison to most games, Far Cry 5 offers a good $60 worth of content, but it may not be worth that to everyone. The good thing is that if gamers held off and bought it at $40, they won’t be missing out on much, if anything, because the game isn’t going anywhere.

Overall, I would confidently give Far Cry 5 a solid 8.0 out of 10, as it is one of the best games this year so far. I hope to see Ubisoft stick to this title and stay active with it, creating lots of additional content to add to its already great longevity.