An open world FPS where you liberate a rural region of Montana from a murderous cultExpect to pay: $60/£50Developer: Ubisoft MontrealPublisher: UbisoftReviewed On: Intel Core i5-6600K @ 3.50 GHz, 8 GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce GTX 980Multiplayer: Drop-in co-op with a friend, multiplayer maps for up to 12 players in Arcade modeLink:In Hope County, Montana, you might find yourself using a guided missile to kill a charging bear. Not because a missile is the best weapon to kill a bear with—a crossbow would be more sporting—but simply because you already have the weapon resting on your shoulder. A moment ago you used it to blow an enemy plane out of the sky and a boat out of the water, so dispatching a bear with it is just quick and convenient, and the sooner the bear is dead, the sooner you can get back to the important task at hand: breaking the county record for catching the heaviest golden trout.Welcome to Far Cry 5, where a quiet spot of fishing can and often will result in piles of burnt wreckage and scattered corpses. It's a chaotic and wonderfully ridiculous open world sandbox of destruction and violence where a short drive down a dirt road can quickly become a pitched battle, as enemy vehicles appear and engage you, friendly fighters arrive and open fire at them, and ravenous animals leap from the woods and attack both. When the smoke finally clears, you may realize you've forgotten where you were going in the first place. Then an eagle swoops down and attacks your face.If you're a Far Cry veteran, this probably all sounds familiar, and Far Cry 5 follows the same blueprint as Far Cry 3 and 4 with a few new tweaks but no massive changes.

1. Far Cry 4 Healing Animations

Far Cry: Primal is an open world action game set during the Stone Age in the fictional Oros Valley, in what is currently Central Europe. It takes place in 10,000 BCE, the beginning of the Mesolithic period. Dec 10, 2012  All 12 healing animations from Far Cry 3. There are other videos of this on YouTube, but I wanted to show the animations while in combat instead of just sitting around in one place and showing.

I'm good with that: Ubisoft refining its wild and turbulent sandbox formula rather than reinventing it suits me just fine. This time you play as a nameless deputy sheriff sent to Hope County to arrest Joseph Seed, a cult leader backed by a heavily-armed force of devoted followers who have taken control of the region using kidnapping, mass murder, and brainwashing as recruitment tools. Your arrest of Seed in the first five minutes quickly goes awry, and your law enforcement cohorts are captured by the cult. Stranded in the mountainous backcountry with no backup, the only way out is to liberate the whole dang area, farm by farm.World seriesHope County is divided into three regions, each controlled by a member of the Seed family.

Defeating them requires first collecting resistance points in their regions, which come from completing missions, liberating captured locals, destroying the cult's resources, and conquering their outposts. Between these objectives you'll have countless random skirmishes, as traffic, enemies, rebels, citizens, and wildlife constantly converge and clash.

It's a busy wilderness. You're constantly swiveling your head around to see where the gunfire is coming from or what people are yelling about, and amusingly, the NPCs react with the same panicked urgency when noticing an enemy plane circling as they do when spotting an approaching skunk.This chaos of overlapping AI factions is almost always a good thing—the best parts of Far Cry are when crazy shit happens. It's just that crazy shit happens nearly constantly, which can occasionally be frustrating if you're hoping for a few minutes of silence to contemplate an environmental puzzle, admire the scenery, or catch a fish in peace.At one point I came across a quiet airfield with two planes parked on it, and thought I'd help myself to one. While preparing to attack the two cultists guarding it, I noticed some movement nearby: it was a bull fighting a mountain lion. As I engaged, one conflict spilled over into the other, and by the end of the fight more cultists had arrived (some in a helicopter), a wolverine had appeared and attacked a fleeing cow, a citizen had driven up in a tractor, two planes (in the air) got into a dogfight, another cultist drove up (in a different tractor), and the planes on the ground had exploded in the ensuing carnage.

I had to settle for stealing one of the tractors, which I used to run over an angry bear that showed up late. I got a great performance using ultra settings (only motion blur was turned off) on my GeForce GTX 980 at 1920x1080: I was typically between 60-65 fps with occasional dips into the mid-50's. James played on his 1070 and found it ran buttery smooth as well.Essentially, it's comparable to Far Cry 4, so if your PC ran that well you should see a similar performance from Far Cry 5. Read more in.To join this chaos you've got a constantly growing arsenal of weapons, including throwable shovels you can awesomely impale enemies with, craftable dynamite and proximity mines, and a generous cache of machine guns, rifles, pistols, and my favorite, the RAT4 rocket launcher, which locks onto vehicles and lets you steer your missile after firing (say, into a bear). There are lots of ways to get around: cars, boats, plus choppers and planes that are just as easy to operate as cars and boats. Cheap perks unlock a grappling hook for climbing, a wingsuit for when you can't be bothered to climb back down, and infinite parachutes, perfect for hastily activating when you realize the roof you just jumped off was a bit higher than you thought.Enemy outposts, as they were in earlier Far Cry games, are the best thing about Far Cry 5. Survey them from a distance, tag enemies with your scope or binoculars, and note other features like alarm towers (which can be used by the enemy to summon reinforcements), caged animals (which can be set free to cause a wonderful ruckus), and explosive barrels (self-explanatory), then either slither around dispensing cultists one by one with melee attacks and silenced weapons, or go in loud with grenades and guns.

There's always satisfaction in being stealthy enough to take an outpost without a single shot being fired, but I prefer a big noisy fight filled with explosions and ragdolling enemies which runs the gamut from exhilarating to hilarious.You can also rip up the joint with missiles and miniguns while hovering overhead in a helicopter, which is a bit mindless but makes for a nice change of pace from all the careful scouting and enemy tagging. You can fling raw meat over the wall and let hungry wolves and cougars tear your enemies' throats out, or rig proximity mines all over the place, sneak away, and wait for patrolling guards to start stepping on them. The freedom you have to approach outposts in different ways extends to a lot of side missions as well.You can fling raw meat over the wall and let hungry bears and cougars tear your enemies' throats out.The Far Cry series has often featured scalable towers that revealed new areas on your map, each with a slightly different configuration but still similar enough to result in what amounted to a repetitive chore of first-person climbing and jumping. While there are a few towers in Far Cry 5, they're only tied to side missions, you can just use a grappling hook to scale them, and they don't reveal map locations. Now you populate your map through exploration and getting tips from citizens, which is a great improvement. Filling in for those tower-climbing puzzles are 'prepper' stashes, caches of weapons, ammo, cash, and crafting resources, often in underground bunkers, sometimes booby trapped, flooded, locked, or with clues scattered around containing information on how to access them.

Infiltrating these prepper stashes can be easy or hard, surprising or boring, annoying, spooky, deadly, or even require a bit of climbing—you never really know what's in a bunker, hideout, or cave, and that's a lot better than climbing a set of slightly different towers.StoryboredFar Cry 5 needed a better villain. The Seeds are boring bad guys, way too talkative without ever saying much, and each will kidnap you multiple times—one can even drag you at will into extended hallucinations—thus interrupting your open world fun to make you suffer through their monologues before either giving you a chance to escape or simply returning you to a friendly bunker. Killing them—which sometimes involves a boss fight where the Seeds gain superhuman powers and take a ridiculous amount of damage before falling—feels less like justice for the county and more like simple relief at not having to listen to their drawn-out speeches any longer.' Look at the headlines. Look who's in charge,' one of the Seeds says, hoping to convince me that bringing about the end of the world is perfectly reasonable because the world is going to end soon anyway. Granted, this is a man who murders, kidnaps, and carves people's sins into their flesh with a knife, then cuts the flesh off and staples it to the wall. It's unclear why this disturbing practice has gained him hundreds of loyal followers, but he's got a point.

The headlines sure are scary these days.Apart from a few scattered lines of dialogue, there's no cohesive message or statement about politics or fascism or militias or anything, really, in Far Cry 5. The cult leaders themselves don't even mention God or religion as often you'd expect, and the cult's motivations are pretty vague beyond killing or drugging everyone who doesn't want to join. Far Cry 5 wants to be whimsical like GTA 5 ('weaponized super-bears' is spoken matter-of-factly), but its irreverence comes at the expense of developing interesting villains with clear motivations.I'm not surprised. Ubisoft didn't have a coherent or serious message about spying, surveillance, and privacy issues in Watch Dogs, either. I don't think any developer is obligated to include social commentary in their game, but to evoke so much of the visual language of religious fundamentalism and secessionism, and then not explore that stuff in any meaningful way, makes Far Cry 5 feel hollow.

Seemingly scared of not pleasing everyone, Ubisoft avoided tackling deeper subjects altogether and decided that the villains were just weirdos. The buddy systemThe dog can detect and tag enemies you can't see, the pilot can drop bombs and strafe targets from above, the bear is a bear.You're not alone in Far Cry 5 unless you want to be. There are generic NPC guns for hire you can bring along for support, and nine distinct AI companions you can recruit from side-missions scattered throughout the county. Three of the companions—the best ones—are animals (a dog, a bear, and a mountain lion), the rest are humans with backstories they won't stop blathering about even once you've heard every last anecdote and observation.

This episode examines the general lack of female representation among standard enemies as well as in the cooperative and competitive multiplayer options of many games, and the ways in which, when female enemies do exist, they are often sexualized and set apart by their gender from the male enemies who are presented as the norm. We then highlight a few examples of games that present female enemies as standard enemies who exist on more-or-less equal footing with their male counterparts.Links & ResourcesThis is the fourth episode in season two of Tropes vs. Women in Video Games. For more on the format changes accompanying season two, please see About the SeriesThe Tropes vs Women in Video Games project aims to examine the plot devices and patterns most often associated with female characters in gaming from a systemic, big picture perspective.

This series will include critical analysis of many beloved games and characters, but remember that it is both possible (and even necessary) to simultaneously enjoy media while also being critical of it’s more problematic or pernicious aspects. This video series is created by Anita Sarkeesian and the project was Games Referenced in this Episode. Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 (2009)Uncharted 4 (2016)Saints Row: The Third (2011)Wolfenstein (2009)Hitman: Absolution (2012)Metal Gear Solid 4 (2008)BioShock Infinite (2013) TranscriptAt the 2014 Electronic Entertainment Expo, the game development company Ubisoft debuted a trailer showcasing the cooperative mode in their upcoming game Assassin’s Creed Unity. One thing viewers quickly noticed about the trailer was that all the assassins in it were male. When questioned about why female characters weren’t an option in this mode, the game’s creative director said that although there were originally plans to allow for female assassins, the development team couldn’t add them because it would require “double the animations, double the voices, and double the visual assets.” Meanwhile, a level designer on the game stated that including female assassins would have meant recreating 8000 animations on a new skeleton.

These comments led to an explosion of controversy and criticism on Twitter, with many people using the sarcastic hashtag “women are too hard to animate.”A number of experienced game developers joined the chorus of voices calling out the absurdity of Ubisoft’s claims. Animator Jonathan Cooper, who had previously worked on Assassin’s Creed III for Ubisoft, tweeted, “I would estimate this to be a day or two’s work. Not a replacement of 8000 animations.” And Manveer Heir of Bioware summed up what Ubisoft was actually saying: “We don’t really care to put the effort in to make a woman assassin.”Ubisoft’s disregard for female character options didn’t stop with Unity. Also at E3 2014, the director of Far Cry 4 admitted to a similar issue with that game’s online co-op mode, saying, “We were inches away from having you be able to select a girl or a guy as your co-op buddy.” Again, the excuse for why this option wasn’t available was that it would just be too much work.

And yet again, what they were really saying was that they just couldn’t be bothered to do the work it would have taken to provide that option. Though it’s worth pointing out that in the two years since this controversy, Ubisoft has made clear efforts to improve the representation of women in the core Assassin’s Creed games, with the most recent entry, Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, giving the option to play as Evie Frye through much of the campaign.Of course, Ubisoft weren’t and aren’t the only ones with this apathetic attitude toward female inclusion. In fact, not doing the necessary work to include women has long been the norm in the video game industry. The FIFA soccer game series, which had its first entry in 1993, took over 20 years before finally introducing female teams in FIFA 16.CLIP: “I’m in the game.”And it took ten years for Call of Duty to introduce female soldiers into its competitive multiplayer with 2013’s Call of Duty: Ghosts. The long-running Battlefield franchise, on the other hand, has still never allowed for playable female characters in its multiplayer modes.There’s an important conversation to be had about the ways in which military shooters work to glorify violence, but as long as we’re going to have such games, it’s actually better when they include female combatants in them.

Now you might be asking yourself, “Doesn’t having female enemies in a game perpetuate violence against women?” And that’s a good, fair question. When we refer to depictions of violence against women, we’re generally discussing situations in which women are being attacked or victimized specifically because they are women, reinforcing a perception of women as victims.Such scenarios are very different from those in which women are presented as active participants. In the Street Fighter games, for instance, when Chun-Li and Ryu fight each other, this isn’t considered violence against women, because the two characters are presented as being on more or less equal footing, and because Chun-Li is an active participant who isn’t being targeted or attacked specifically because she’s a woman.Similarly, the waves of male attackers players face in so many games are typically not passive victims. They are active participants in the conflict, and importantly, the violence against them isn’t gendered. Players fight with them because they’re on the opposing side, not specifically because they are men.Unfortunately, when female combatants do appear in games, they are often presented in sexualized ways which inevitably lend the player’s attacks an air of gendered violence. In Saints Row The Third’s so-called “Whored Mode,” for instance, players must defeat waves of sexualized women, sometimes beating them to death with a large purple dildo.In the 2009 game Wolfenstein, the Elite Guard are a special all-female enemy unit whose absurd uniforms sexualize not only the female characters themselves but also player’s acts of violence against them.Similarly, in 2012’s Hitman Absolution, the Saints are a special unit of female assassins who wear latex fetish gear underneath nun’s habits.

It’s a ludicrous design choice that is transparently intended to sexualize these enemies.And in Metal Gear Solid 4, the Beauty & the Beast unit is an enemy group made up of five female soldiers that players fight over the course of the game. At a certain point during these encounters, each boss sheds her armor and appears as a woman in form-fitting attire.CLIP: “It’s all so funny.”If players then avoid the Beauty’s deadly embrace for several minutes without killing or neutralizing her, the game transports them to a white room where equipping the camera results in the character making sultry poses. Funny how that doesn’t happen with the male bosses in the game.Whenever female combatants are dressed in sexualizing attire, it sets them noticeably apart from other enemy units. It’s intended to make the player’s encounters with them sexually titillating, and that’s particularly troubling considering that those encounters often involve fighting and killing those characters. Violence against female characters should never be presented as “sexy”.The way for games to handle female combatants is not to present them as sexualized treats for the player.

Rather, it’s to present them simply as combatants who happen to be women fighting alongside their male counterparts on equal footing.For all of its many, many problems, one thing Bioshock Infinite did right was to include non-sexualized female officers on Columbia’s police force. And in Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, both the player’s gang and the enemy gang have rank-and-file female members who fight alongside the men.Despite the presence of female combatants in games like these, there is still a tendency for game studios to treat female representation as some kind of extravagant goal, rather than simply treating it as standard in the same way they handle male representation. The excuse that I hear most often for the absence of female combatants in games is that players wouldn’t believe it. But games, even ones that draw on historical locations or events like the Assassin’s Creed series, create their own worlds and set the tone for what we will or won’t believe. To participate in the worlds games create, we happily accept time travel, superpowers, ancient alien civilizations, the ability to carry infinite items, the idea that eating a hot dog can instantly heal your wounds, and a million other fictions.

It’s certainly not too much to ask that these fictional worlds give us believable female combatants too.The media we engage with has a powerful impact on our ideas of what’s believable and what’s not. Games like Assassin’s Creed Syndicate demonstrate that when the existence of female combatants is presented as straightforward, normal and believable, players have no problem believing it.

Far Cry 4 Healing Animations

And they shouldn’t, since, unlike those magical healing hot dogs I mentioned, female combatants actually exist.