There are very few games that I have played that once I finished the main story I felt a bit sad that there wasn't more. Even some of the best games out there I feel as though they did some things wrong or that the story just wasn't really all that great and by the time I finished these "almost great" games I was pleased they were over with.
There have been a few games that I have played in the past few years that when they were over, I still wanted more and I was a little disappointed that there wasn't going to be any more. These games that immediately come to mind were Hollow Knight, Ender Lilies, and now Far Cry 5.
After I finished both endings for Far Cry 5 and yes, I immediately went back in to make the other decision after making one of them, I was pretty ok with both endings. There was a lot of people that were upset with the real ending of the game but I was ok with it because I feel as though it really tied the entire story together in places where it didn't make a lot of sense before. I'm talking about how you would be constantly captured by the bad guys and then escape over and over. The true ending kind of suggests that it was actually necessary for you to make it all the way through and not be killed, which kind of doesn't make sense entirely seeing as how you almost certainly were in fact, killed, many many times on your journey all the way to the end.
While FC5 doesn't have the greatest FPS mechanics and I do have some gripes about button configurations (mostly that swapping ground weapons and looting corpses utilize the SAME BUTTON) for the most part the action sequences are done very very well. You also have a ton of options: If you want to stealth kite around a base or stalk your prey in the shadows, you can do that. If you want to kick in the front door guns as blazin', that is also an option.
While the vehicles can be a little disappointing from a purist point of view, it is pretty obvious early on that you were never meant to spend very much time in the helicopters. I found that out after crash landing yet again into a body of water.
Outside of a few missions it isn't really necessary to use the vehicles unless you want to and because I accidentally auto-drove into enemy territory many times only to be immediately overwhelmed, I generally adopted a method of simply pulling up a few hundred meters from any location and just walking it in. This of course is silly that this is an option because strongholds would normally have some sort of lookout, wouldn't they? I'm nitpicking with this though so I'll just leave that alone especially since it would make the game extremely tedious if the bases did have lookouts like that.
Then we have the companions
If you are like me you usually opt to play 1-player games. I have never really cared for multiplayer and certainly not pickup games where some 11 year old is going to cuss me out about how i need to be better at a game when he has no idea what it is like to have a job. The companions is a great cure for this because you can have 2 followers that will go on nearly all of the missions with you. We all have our favorites but in most cases I went for a sniper and also the really cute and deadly "Cheeseburger" the bear. It was quite satisfying to have my enormous bear invade a camp and bring everyone out of their hiding places only to have them popped down by me and my sniper friends sitting at 80 meters away with our sniper rifles.
I also appreciated the open world environment. Some people out there complained that the world was "too small" but in my mind it was the perfect size. There is only so much terrain differences that can be built into the Montana countryside and if they had made it larger, it simply would have resulted in large areas that contain nothing in it. This was something that annoyed me about the original Horizon game. I see no point in increasing the size of the map if there is going to be nothing in it.
As for the story: I appreciated the somewhat realistic aspects of it. Instead of having some otherworldly super enemies we have a very realistic group of bad guys who use brainwashing, religion, and drugs in order to compel their followers. I wont get into any more spoilers that that but to me this is a lot easier to get on board with than some magical rock that fell from space. I also like that the bosses didn't turn into flying robots or suddenly gain the ability to shoot fireballs out of their fingers but instead employed more realistic and real-world weaponry.
one of the bosses in the game, Faith Seed, is so damn sweet that I actually felt bad defying her and eventually defeating her. She never gets angry at you and is kind to the bitter end. This was actually part of the story where you are warned to "not listen to her" because she is so compelling. The fact that they were able to actually build this notion into the human experience of the game was pretty amazing to me.
There are also a tons of methods of achieving completion in this game. There are a few (I think 9) missions that absolutely must be completed to finish the game, but other than those it is up to you which missions you are going to take on in order to achieve victory. By the time I had completed each area, there were still a ton of things that I could do to clear out that area even more but you don't have to do it.
So after about 20-30 hours I have finished Far Cry 5 and honestly, I'm a bit sad that it is over. Sure, I could go in there and try to 100% the map but I've never been a completionist like this. I don't think I have ever 100%'d a game in my adult life.
So now what do I move on to? I already loaded up Far Cry 4 in the hopes that it would be a similar experience but it isn't really doing it for me. Far Cry 6 is still full price and I never do that. So I guess I'll just have to search around a bit but I fear that it is going to be a while before I end up finding a game that I feel is as wonderful on all fronts as I felt this one was. It will go into my top 20 of all time for sure.