Warning:
The single player shop requires an internet connection. If their servers are down or anything like it you won't be able to spend your *ingame money*. This is a side effect of adding microtransactions to a single player game.

Really good. No complaints! All the artists working on this game did an amazing job (except the writers, but more on that later).

Combat feels great. There are some platforming sections, which are pretty good and don't overstay their welcome. You do end up driving around a little too much for my taste. I just wish fights lasted longer. You run out of targets too quickly.

In my opinion, FC5's map is the best in the series. It does feel like a rural area where people live and work.

I think weapons could have been more varied, there are many versions of the same item (long barrel, short barrel, short stock, etc.) that could have been mods. And there are probably just as many basic weapons as there are ridiculously colorful, "special" versions (Blood Dragon sniper rifle, a golden 1911 with an eagle on it, etc.). A deeper weapon customization system could have been great. I didn't expect the different ammo types, though. Those were cool.

The very, very simple crafting system for explosives and the like is welcome. I don't appreciate overcomplicated crafting in a shooter. I do not miss Far Cry 3's ridiculous wallet crafting.

I liked the non-human companions (dog, cougar, bear) and the dude on a plane. They made the game feel a little more varied. Cheeseburger (the bear) soaks up a ton of damage, Peaches (the big cat) is amazing at stealth murder, and Boomer (the dog) spots bad guys. Now if only these animals would ride in your car with you...

However, as much as you may enjoy the gameplay, it'll be interrupted 9 times. You will be kidnapped in an aggravating fashion with no way to stop or evade it, and it will result in often lame story missions that break up the experience.
It feels like the game punishes you for playing.

After and/or during said missions you'll have to listen to annoying and quite frankly moronic monologues by the game's antagonists. And oh boy, do they love their monologues. You have to sit there and listen to these people saying stupid sh*t in an attempt to justify their horrible cultish acts. The game acts like you're in the wrong sometimes, but it's just poor writing. You're an agent of the law doing your job and defending the innocent (ACAB aside since it's fiction), and the villains have nothing to stand on in spite of the game trying to make you look like the bad guy/gal.

Throughout the game I wanted so hard to punch the monologuing villains in the face until they died. But alas, you're not the real protagonist in this story, the writers' terrible characters are.

There's no real theme to the game. There's no moral to the story, nothing being learned. If the writers thought they were teaching the player a lesson, I doubt they even knew what said lesson was. Far Cry 5 has no idea what it wants to say, and it ends up saying nothing of value at all while repeatedly taking away player agency.

It feels preachy (and I don't mean the religious cult characters, I mean the game itself), but it doesn't respect the player's freedom to make choices. All the "screw ups" (if they even are screw ups) are plot points the player has no choice in.

Nitpicking a little deeper, it's clear the story makes no sense from the get go. Why can't people leave the county? There are countless planes and helicopters. Why can't they retake their homes? There are endless weapons and it seems every inhabitant is a fighter. Surely a cult that came from somewhere else wouldn't have seventy-f*cking-thousand soldiers, right? (Hint: they do). What does Bliss actually do? Does it turn people into zombies? Does it make them euphoric? Vulnerable to conditioning? It's ridiculously versatile. It's a plot-drug.

Speaking of conditioning, not only does brainwashing not work like that, but even in the game it's inconsistent and barely taken advantage of by the villains.

I don't usually complain about "muh realism" like this, but a game that is clearly heavily inspired by our current reality could do much better. Make the (clearly Evangelical-based) antagonists be backed by powerful people, add some CIA brainwashing specialists, include some way in which the inhabitants were disarmed...

The game is also apolitical to a fault, considering it deals with religious cults, guns, charismatic leaders, rural America, and the threat of nuclear war. (Bear in mind Ubisoft capitalized on these things when marketing the game.)
It's like Ubisoft wanted to have its cake and eat it too. They desired praise for "tackling" heavy themes, but they didn't actually want to give any opinion on them. So the result is a washed up representation of serious issues. Like a kid's cartoon version of Watchmen.

**Spoilers ahead, obviously**

The nukes fall. The cult predicted it correctly.

First of all: how the flying f*ck does Seed capture everyone again? You destroyed his armies and liberated almost the entire county. Is every single inhabitant in Hope County absolutely useless? (Why do they stop being useless when they change teams?)

Onto the ending itself. It's utter trash. And I say "it" because only one of them is canon, the other one resets the game state to before the final mission (as if you'd failed).

So... nuclear apocalypse. The ending isn't earned. It's either a poor attempt at edginess or a very significant failure at understanding the gaming medium (i.e.: your actions were absolutely irrelevant), not that it would have been a good ending in any other medium (because of nonexistent theming and an abysmal setup relegated to optional audios). The game has no coherent message, if any at all. The bad guys accurately predicted nuclear war and started committing unspeakable atrocities in preparation for it. Even though you stop them, your good deeds are ignored in the end. What's the point of such a narrative? At least Spec Ops: The Line did the meta commentary well.

Far Cry 5's ending is basically: "Rocks fall everyone dies". It doesn't fit the tone of most of the game (which is all over the place), and everything you did was for absolutely nothing. Don't get me wrong, a good story can end in tragedy, but it has to be earned. It needs to be set up. It needs to fit a broad theme. Radio transmissions and answering machine messages are not enough (ask Fallout 76 about putting all your story in prerecorded messages).

To use another TT RPG term, Joseph Seed feels like a GMPC: a player character played by the game master (a huge no-no, because they end up being pet characters and "Mary Sues" who steal the spotlight).

Imagine you're reading a "choose your own adventure" book, but every path goes through the same preachy chapters in which you're blamed for the words written on the pages, and then all those paths end up with "everyone dies and your actions are irrelevant". That's Far Cry 5.

TL;DR: gameplay is great but the story is a massive failure on every aspect and often interrupts gameplay. The ending ruins it all. I miss Pagan Min.