specifically talking about 3, 4, 5, and the “expansion” games like Blood Dragon and New Dawn. And I still haven’t played Far Cry 6 so I can’t comment on that.

Every time I get bored of all my favorite games I reinstall one of the three and go on like 30 hour binge through the whole game again. I just love them so much. I don’t love the whole games, each one has some shockingly frustrating main missions and some really odd writing (even 3, which has a villain who was written in a great way).

Specifically I’m talking about the whole base control gameplay loop. Taking over the map meant taking over bases or fortifications of enemies, raising a flag, maybe rescuing some hostages. In all three games they start you with bases that only have 4 or 5 enemies, but the endgame bases are dozens of high level enemies in a military compound. I love approaching a base, sulking through the woods, finding high ground and scouting it out, and oh man the options presented were amazing, especially when you were nearing the endgame and had unlocked most of the weapons. You could go on a mountaintop and snipe everybody, or just blast em all with your rocket launcher. And the developers never prevented you from using the “nuclear option” of just doing a strafing run on everybody with a helicopter. I also loved how often you’d approach a base of enemies and see some clearly developer-placed options. I remember in Far Cry 4 there was one base of enemies really near the end of the game which had like 20 foot high concrete walls, and if you explored a little you could find a place you could put your grappling hook to get over the wall. But it wasn’t exactly developer-intended because you weren’t even nearly safe as soon as you scaled the wall.

And I love how much of an action game these three games are. I love getting chased by enemies then whipping out the grenade launcher and blowing them all up in a fireball, or stealth killing one guy and stealing his knife to stealth kill another one a couple meters down the road. It felt like Metal Gear Solid V on steroids, doing all these insane things that no human could conceivably accomplish. Hell in Far Cry 4 and 5 you can wingsuit off a ledge then assassinate an enemy and take no falling damage.

That isn’t to say the games’ main missions or even side missions are great. I remember getting insanely frustrated at one Far Cry 4 mission that I had to go take a walk outside, and Far Cry 5 seemed to really like to repeat the same exact mission type three times in the main story. But they redeemed themselves with some killer action setpieces. In Far Cry 4 there’s one where you storm a massive fortification of enemies on a bridge by just driving straight into it and some amazing music plays during the whole thing.

And the best part to me is that I would never finish a base capturing mission and get bored of it or think it was tedious to go on to the next one. I would just be excited to look at the map and see another one a mile down the road to do the same cool shit at. When the games ended I was always disappointed that there were no more to take over.

Sorry I know this post is mostly just me gushing about the games but I haven’t really had a place to talk to people about them besides people who already like the games.