Shooty-Story!

So I "finished" another couple games recently...

The Darkness II was offered up recently for free, so I picked it up. It's a stylish, mediocre shooter with an above-average story that's fairly compelling. It's relatively short, wrapping in maybe seven hours of play time. Gameplay ranged from okay to clunky in places, but I only hit one real issue (a clipping error that prevented progress until vsync was turned on, oddly). There are several good characters and the story, though almost completely linear, felt pretty good.

Far Cry 5, meanwhile, is a very solid shooter with a sprawling sandbox filled with neat mechanics and a lot of characters and side missions that are pretty cool. The main story, though... well... I would say the main story goes from edgy with a little potential to becoming downright laughable to having one of the most flatly disappointing endings I've seen in a game.
It's a very minor spoiler to go into this in a general sense, but I feel I must. See, I'm willing to allow a game roughly one "PC is knocked out, comes to imprisoned, and must escape." With this game's setup with one "big bad" and three "lieutenants" you have to go through first, I would have accepted it as the modus operandi of one of those characters to be used repeatedly. But no, almost every one of the narrative story missions triggered by game progress involves one of those game characters incapacitating you in some way before you fight your way free. That gets silly very fast. Also, it takes most of the bite out of "pulling the trigger" on an unintended target when there's literally no way to avoid it short of no playing the game.
I feel like the Far Cry team (or management) is still trying to recapture the magic they had with Vaas from FC3 (who was more memorable than the "real" villain of that game), but forcing face time with the Seed family doesn't accomplish that.
I think there still might be side missions that are worth going back and doing, but the main story was a bust, and I'm just as glad to be done with it.

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