Conclusion

Far Cry 5 contains most of the gameplay elements we've seen in previous Far Cry titles (and other similar games, like Ghost Recon Wildlands). Basically, you have to eliminate opposition camps to liberate them, which increases your score in the respective zone. New story quests unfold as that score increases, with the local leader becoming available as a kill target at some point. Clean out a certain number of world zones and you get to meet the head honcho. If you previously played a Far Cry title, you'll feel right at home in the beautiful, richly detailed open world.

Don't get me wrong, Far Cry 5 is more than just a reskin of the existing game concept. A new feature is that of ally NPCs who will help during combat, controlled by simple "move" and "kill" commands that don't distract while fighting. Also new is a vehicle purchase system not unlike what we've seen in Grand Theft Auto or Just Cause 3. Instead of just fighting on the ground, you get to take the fight to the skies using various planes and helicopters. Your arsenal can be customized with additional magazine capacity, scopes, and silencers, and the skill tree contains dozens of options to match your playstyle. Of all these concepts we've seen before in other titles, Ubisoft just picked up the best ones and integrated them into Far Cry 5, which is not a bad thing.

The story is interesting and reels you in right from the start. As far as I know, it's the first time that this "christian fundamentalist" scenario is presented in a game, and Far Cry 5 does it well. Cooperative multiplayer is included, but in a somewhat odd implementation—only the host player makes progress. So, if you team up with one of your buddies to play through the game together that's not gonna happen. As soon as the second player leaves (who basically acts like those ally NPCs mentioned above), he'll be right at where he started in terms of game completion. Let's hope Ubisoft addresses this in a patch or at least give us an option to choose the way we want to play co-op.

We tested the game using actual gameplay, with the latest drivers for AMD and NVIDIA (which were released just a few hours ago). While a benchmark is available, it seems quite short and doesn't accurately represent in-game performance (the FPS results from the benchmark are roughly 10% higher than what you'll see in typical gameplay). Picking our own scene also helps avoid optimizations that may have been added to drivers to perform better specifically in the benchmark. Last but not least, our own scene gives us the freedom to properly warm up graphics cards—both GPU vendors have some level of thermal throttling on their recent cards, which our testing takes into account.

Graphics are good, but not a huge leap forward compared to previous Far Cry titles. Most textures are of good detail, but sometimes, you encounter blurry textures. I'd love to see a high-res texture pack for Far Cry 5; the config file hints at such an option, containing "HDTexturesOptionSeen" and "HDTexturesEnabled", which both don't do anything at the moment (I tried). VRAM usage of the game is surprisingly low with only 2.7 GB for 1080p Ultra. 4K Ultra requires 4 GB VRAM, which is not a lot considering today's high-end graphics cards have 8 GB and more memory. Overall hardware requirements are alright for a 2017 title, maybe slightly above average. For 1080p Ultra, you should have a GTX 1070 or RX 580; for 1440p, a GTX 1080 or RX Vega is a good choice, and for 4K, you'll need CrossFire or SLI. Far Cry 5 is an AMD sponsored title, which means no Gameworks eye candy, which also means that the game runs very well on AMD hardware, especially Radeon RX Vega, which has been given some extra love thanks to the inclusion of Rapid Packed Math and Shader Intrinsics that both improve performance on these GPUs. It's impressive what these can do. RX Vega 64 sits right in the middle between the GTX 1080 and GTX 1080 Ti. The expected average would be that of AMD's RX Vega 64 roughly matching NVIDIA's GTX 1080. I did some quick testing, comparing the new NVIDIA GameReady driver with the previous one, and I'd estimate performance gains at roughly 3.5%, which is quite decent.

But where is DirectX 12? Back when Microsoft's new API was announced, we've been promised a stream of AAA titles using it. Right now, it seems nobody really wants to take the risk of investing the necessary resources in development as the preference is, rather, to stick with DirectX 11. With each new game release, I'm getting less and less convinced that DX12 is the new messiah. Rather, my impression is that nearly all relevant effects and techniques can be applied using DirectX 11 and that game developers are better off investing their time into making better games.

In closing, I have to admit that for this article, I played more Far Cry 5 than I wanted. If you like this kind of genre and are not tired of open world shooters yet, it's a good game that it very entertaining and ticks a lot of feature checkboxes.