Far Cry 5
Positives:
- In general, almost everything is improved.
- It runs like a dream. It's actually amazing how well it runs. 2560x1600 max settings, with antialiasing, 60fps on my Ryzen 1200@3.9 and Vega 64, with plenty of headroom on the GPU - it runs very cool & quiet
- It's very snappy and accurate, the controls flow well and it's overall a pleasure to play, except for some button conflicts (e.g. use/loot/loot weapon)
- The user interface is reasonably well designed for PC.
- The options menu is absolutely amazing.
- The graphics are nice looking and realistic, although it's not quite as beautiful as some other 2017-2018 games.
- Autosaving works pretty well. It never let me down. I'd still prefer a real saving system and especially a possibility to save properly during missions (....although in its defence, the missions are overall really short).
- The soundtrack is fucking awesome, there's no other way to say it. Especially the religious choir songs of the antagonists are really catchy and likable
- The characters are pretty charismatic, but also extremely one-dimensional... except for Faith whose personality and backstory was actually interesting, motivations were quite belieavable and I really liked the character overall.
- The companion/specialist system is a really neat new feature and fits an openworlder like this.
- The ease of spawning new planes/helicopters/boats and getting more ammo/items from any shop might not be realistic but it definitely makes the game more fun to play.
- The open world is "big enough". It's not big by any means and definitely doesn't feel vast in the way slower-burning open world RPGs feel but it's correctly sized and laid out for the narrative.
- The way you find missions and progress the regions feels pretty good and natural.
- The perks system is way better than anything they had before for progression.
- The improvements they've made to stealth gameplay, melee, and bow gameplay feel great. Taking an outpost stealthily with bow / melee feels really satisfying.
Negatives:
- The narrative is still somewhere between "meh" and "wtf". The plot doesn't make any sense, the characters (you, the allies, and the enemies) all behave irrationally, stuff that happens to you and others quite often doesn't make sense in a continuity sense, the (bad) narrative is completely on rails, and the ending ranks highly among the worst ever in gaming history.
- The hidden narrative elements which lead to the ending are really a case example of how grand ideas and pseudo-symbolic mumbo jumbo don't make for a good plot. It's like they accidentally forgot everything the games industry has learned about narrative for open world games over the last 20 years. It's on par with Mass Effect 3's ending in how terrible it is.
- The protagonist really needs lines and voice acting.
- In the game world things spawn and respawn way too often. Like planes, enemy road vehicles, etc. You can't get a moment's peace (not even 10 seconds).
- There's not enough weapon selection. Not enough variety within weapon types and outside of that, blatant omissions like you can't equip a knife.
- The weapon customization is full of brainfarts like you can put suppressors on M249's or pump-action shotguns and a suppressor is always objectively better in stats than not having it. Same goes for scopes and weapon variety itself, in stats there's way less difference than you'd expect. So basically all the systems are there but what you can do with them is boring.
- The perks system doesn't have particularly interesting perks. It just unlocks stuff that would otherwise be unlocked by default. Additionally it has permanents that might as well be weapon mods or wearable items. Having specialists locked behind story progression is already progression itself, what's the point of locking specialist slots behind the perks system?
- Some things are still way too tanky. Like wildlife for example, which can easily take multiple headshots with the biggest guns in the game. And this time I played on Normal.
- Some tech issues. For example, companion banter (otherwise a really good feature) is broken and glitches out almost 100% of the time. Some glitched missions. Difficulty sometimes reset from Normal to Easy by itself. Also, gametime counter seems to be half-working.
Overall... I'd recommend it as a brainless shooter game, it's better than earlier FC games, and the soundtrack is amazing, but it's not a must-have masterpiece.