if you've played one Ubisoft game you've almost played them all. It's redundant to even say that at this point. It' a common theme with this developer. Assassins Creed, Watch Dogs, Far Cry, Ghost Recon... Any open world Ubisoft game is largely the same on the surface. You enter this big open world and roam from mission to mission, unlocking different regions of the map by completing side missions and upgrading your arsenal.
so with that said all I can do is compare what makes FC5 different than the previous two entries.
then, what does it have going for it?
+The graphics are appealing, with much attention to detail. Lighting, water, animations are nice to look at
+The map and setting is decent with a realistic but not fruity color palette, everything is a lush green/yellow/brown with sprawling hillsides, forests, and towns of america to explore.
+ gunplay is satisfying enough, with nice animations. more on this later however.
+ Decent fluid controls
+ If you're looking for a co op campaign with good graphics, it's here. *With caveats, more on the co op later.
and now what are the negatives? unfortunately, everything else.
-Every facet of the writing, story, is forgettable and corny, cringy and embarrasing. constant stereotypes, boring cliche inane conversations that go on way too long, people talking constantly with forced witty humor, constant political interjections .. it's just really tiresome to listen to. It's like they thought "Hey we want the Borderlands / Saints Row 4 audience" it sucks.
- None of the characters are memorable or interesting, the opposite all of them are dull, boring, and uninteresting. Even the villian is lame.
- Shallow story that consists of 'Bad antagonist vs Good player character' yeah it's that basic.
- The mission structure is so boring and dull. Like all ubisoft games, most of the time is spent travelling back and forth mission to mission, then you realize you can just unlock a Helicoptor which totally makes driving vehicles trivial, so then the whole game consists of spawning the next helicoptor, travelling to the next mission, rinse repeat. Sometimes you can fast travel a bit closer, but you're always going to be in a helicoptor for the majority of the time.
- Once you arrive at the mission, rarely do they consist of anything unique. I can think about maybe 5 moments during the whole campaign that I can even remember let alone were cool and standout.
- Every single mission is so boring they feel like side quests, but they're not. All you do is:
"go here, kill X people"
"go here, steal X truck"
"go here, blow up X thing"
"go here, find X item"
- or the extremely egregious parts that are like:
"Go to this GENERAL AREA and wander around aimlessly waiting for X amount of vehicles to spawn so you can capture/blow up"
- These objectives are so fucking bad they can take an hour to do alone and all you do is drive around in circles waiting for something to spawn. Trash.
Outside of these, you have a few rare moments where it showcases a new location or bunker or unique objective but it's few and far between.
- Worst of all, you can't even do the main missions without doing SIDE MISSIONS. Why are they called optional side missions if they're infact literally not? To unlock main missions you have to raise the progress bar in the region for main missions to appear; to do this, you complete various side missions which raises the 'resistance points' allowed to unlock more missions. The worst part is, if playing co op, only the host can see this. Which means that if the host doesn't figure this out, the co op partner cant even realize it, and you'll waste hours of time trying to figure out why you don't have any missions to do.
- Co op mode is pretty shit and feels barely developed. For example, the co op partner cannot unlock any weapons, or even see the progress bar for the missions after they complete. Nor can the co op player unlock a lot of perks on the skill tree. Why? I don't know. Apparently you have to play through the whole game single player to be able to have unlocks in the co op mode. What sense does that make? None. Really bizarre design choices, or rather flaws.
- So, since the coop partner is so limited, he will be using the same 3 or 4 guns the whole campaign. The host can drop a gun for him, but its such a pain in the ass its not worth it. The co op partner can unlock a select few guns under the 'prestiege' category, but they all have stupid pink purple unicorn skins and crap its just not fun to use. I truly do not understand this awful system.
- Game constantly takes control away from you and is a total clusterfuck. Within a 1 hour game session you can expect to constantly be teleported around randomly, have characters stopping your movement and ranting at you with the most boring cliche dialogue, be forced to sit and listen to inane stereotypical unfunny americana crap, and being teleported to 'minigame' segments where you have to do arbitary 'dream state' things that are totally jarring and unfun. Multiple times I was just riding around in a helicoptor then suddenly I was teleported inside a cage and was forced to do some stupid minigame countdown race to the finish type thing. Really stupid.
- AI is shit. While I said the gunplay is decent, the AI is a joke. They barely know what the fuck they're doing half the time. Half the time they just stand there out in the open like pricks doing nothing. Rarely do they take cover or do anything outstanding. Just really unimpressive AI for such a modern game. I've seen games from 2001 have better AI.
- Music is pretty annoying stupid upbeat folky crap everytime you liberate an outpost. The same song everytime. sound is annoying in general. Even the guns sound weird and atleast for me it sounded like they were glitching out half the time and sounding underwater or some shit. The game just sounds annoying. There's always someone bitching in your fucking ear or yelling shit through a microphone at you or yapping at you with some retarded dialogue. It's just irritating to listen to this game.
- Perk system which feels phoned in. Like all Ubisoft games. Like, the game didn't need one, but since all other games have one, they shat it in. It's trivial and barely changes anything.
- Boss fights which are a total joke and are techincally 'highlights' because everything else is so bland. But really the game is piss easy.
- No difficulty selection and the game is pretty trivial and easy, which further leaves you feeling not very engaged all that often.
So to summarize, the game has far more annoyances than it does enjoyment. The worst offenders is the general mood of the game shifting towards a more light hearted witty and joking style borderlands/saints row shit which just puts a bad taste in my mouth and is annoying as fuck to listen to. I don't like any of the writing or characters, which makes the constant cutscenes even more annoying to sit through. Yeah you can skip them but I'm trying to get the actual experience intended, and it was not a great one siting through it all.
What it has going for it is the controls, graphics, and the scope of the map and visuals you can get while going through it, and some servicable but generic gunplay. Maybe if I did another playthrough and skipped all the dialogue, cutscenes, and just wandered around listening to music and doing the main quests it would be slightly better but nah fuck that, theres better games to play.
Games just need to tell story through the game world and the player expeirences, not constantly yanking you out of gameplay to show you a fucking movie. That shit sucks and better be good enough to justify its self, and here it doesn't do that.
By the end of the game I had no idea what the fuck was going on as I just didn't give a shit about the story at all. It's so shallow. Bad cult vs Good authority (player and team). Was happy to see the credits roll to uninstall.
5/10
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