Far Cry 5
This game has an even worse ending than Shadow of War. It's barely even an ending at all. It's an anti-ending, a nihilistic fart, a giant "Fuck you" from Ubisoft to the player. If another dev, like Rockstar, had made this, I might have considered it a deliberate troll, but I'm sure that in reality the assholes at Ubisoft who wrote this are patting themselves on the back about how deep and subversive and clever they are. It's enormously stupid and unsatisfying.
Rushy has asked me why I care about the story so much. I care about as much as Ubisoft does, which is to say that it's fair to criticize the story heavily when it's so prominent in the game. Make no mistake, there's no escaping this story. To a degree, the game allows you to choose which missions you want to complete to earn the "resistance points" you need to progress, but at set intervals within each region, you're scripted to be captured by your enemies and delivered to the local underboss so that they can monologue at you and give you a mission to escape from them. Even if you're in the middle of a different story mission. Even if there are no enemies within a mile of your current location. I don't necessarily hate these intervals. All four of the cult's leaders are pretty decent video game villains with excellent voice acting, and I like how determined they are to actually win you over to their side, but there must have been a better way to incorporate these missions into the game than having you instantly being captured by invisible enemies at seemingly-random times.
Speaking of your interactions with the villains, I hate that you're a nameless mute in this game. What a bizarre step backwards with no discernible benefit for the series. The story, such as it is, would be improved so, so much if the main character was, you know, an actual character. These villains needed someone to actually bounce off of and interact with to be properly realized. And there was an easy solution if they wanted to include the villainous monologues - gag the player character. It also bothers me a little that you're constantly being addressed as "rookie" throughout the game. Even after slaughtering hundreds of cult members and being far and away the best fighter in the entire county, you're still the rookie, the new guy, the low man on the totem pole. It feels very condescending. What sense does it even make for you to be a sheriff's deputy when you're clearly a stranger who knows almost nobody there, anyway? You're new to the department, but I hardly think you'd be new to the county. Wouldn't it be a much better fit for the player character to be the US Marshal determined to bring down the cult? It would explain how nobody knows you, indicate that you probably already have some experience already, and even lend some resonance to the idea the game keeps pushing about how maybe this is all your fault and you're the real villain here.
Aside from all that, there is a lot of fun to be had in this game. I like the nonlinear structure, the perk system of leveling yourself up is a welcome simplification of the animal leathers gimmick from previous games, and the setting is wonderful - although I will say that I'm not a fan of the frequent animal attacks. These animals are far too aggressive and overpowered, and what really irritates me is that I strongly suspect Ubisoft deliberately amped that element up in the hopes of provoking memes and Internet jokes. What a terrible detail to focus on. Another thing that I dislike is the heavy reliance on surrealistic setpieces. In previous games, they'd have just a handful of trippy scenes, and that would be fine, but here, they're a crutch for a dev that was clearly too lazy to properly arrange the geography and mechanics of grounded setpieces. In a hallucination, they can do anything they want! Have enemies respawn on the spot. Give the boss a huge bar of health. Have the boss disappear when shot and appear somewhere else. Let the player run around a large area without worrying about where in the overworld it is. Spawn crates of ammo for them between rounds. It's so easy when you don't have to worry about rules and logic!
I know that this is all over the place, but it's how I feel. tl;dr: not interested in discussing how realistic things are in an alternate universe post-apoc game w/ talking mutants and ghouls