The game doesn't create any emotional connections, I don't feel any emotions from what's happening on the screen. 80% of all cut-scenes with cult leaders consist of listening to monotonous self-descriptive monologues. The protagonist is nameless and a silent assistant to the shriff. There are virtually no important events between the prologue and the finale. The schizophrenic verbiage of the sectarians carries no plot or meaning.
The plot is completely unstructured:
It starts with the assistant sheriff and a team of officers flying in to arrest the leader of a radical sect. The idea already sounds silly. They fail and start a localized war in the state of Montana (where's the army, reinforcements?). The antagonist is a quiet schizophrenic who blindly believes he is right.
There are 3 storylines in the game, which are not connected to each other in any way.
If you perform tasks from different regions not sequentially, but in parallel, you get this:
First, Jacob pulls you out of the open world and tells you how hard it is to fight in Iraq.
After 10 minutes you are pulled out of the open world by Faith and told that he was beaten and disrespected at school.
After another 15 minutes, John pulls you out and tells you how his sins were washed away with auto-aggression and the great word "yes".
It looks like 3 people with attention deficit disorder constantly want to talk to you.
John Seed is centered around childhood abuse, he was beaten as a child and loved the pain and now he believes that through pain we get rid of our sins.
Vera Sid is a girl who's a drug addict. There's not much more to say about her. It's unclear if she was a drug addict before she joined the cult or after she met Father Joseph and he drugged her? Initially she wants to appear to be a victim of circumstance, but then as we find out we learn that she is not.
Jacob Sid is a military veteran and social Darwinist who believes that only the strongest should be summoned.
And the main antagonist, Joseph Sid, lost his family in a car accident.
Each of the four antagonists is traumatized by something and has a reason to be bad.
And what do they do about that reason? Pretty much nothing. The main problem with FC5 is that it's not emotionally engaging. The player is a blank slate that is impossible to dialog with. The antagonists do nothing to make the player want to kill them. The player is not involved in the story in any way. Kill the Sheriff? Marshal? So what? I don't care. The protagonist (player) has no connection to these characters.

FC5 is not a game about religion. FC5 is an expression of the main writer's childhood fears of "fear of global apocalypse". It's impossible to understand this until you read some interviews with the writer.
The game has only 3 endings:

1. Easter ending and the only one with meaning: in the beginning you don't arrest anyone, turn around and leave. It's logical - you see what army the main sectarian has gathered around him and trying to arrest him with four people is suicide, it's logical to come back with the national guard and arrest all these crazy people.

2. Nuclear explosion and the beginning of World War III in the final game when you have cleared the entire state of Montana and come to arrest Joseph Sid suddenly starts World War III. Pointless and very dumb. Unexpected. This outcome is a force majeure circumstance that could have ended the game at any moment. Neither the antagonist nor the protagonist did anything to make the ending happen. ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.

3. Similar to Easter, except your team refuses to arrest Father at the FINAL game. The car with the officers leaves the state, the sheriff turns on the radio, but by a strange coincidence, the car starts playing the trigger song "Only you" and then the screen goes blank. The thing is that Jacob Seed "trained" the protagonist to kill everyone in the room by this trigger, so it is logical to assume that the protagonist killed all his colleagues in the car.

The gameplay is fun and addictive.
The open world is the best in the entire series.
There are so many quests and activities.
Almost every NPC offers you a quest or point to explore.
Every mission has a minimal narrative.
Through small quests, many engaging and emotional stories are told.
New partner system. 9 unique sidekicks with their own skills.
There is a cooperative mode and it's great.
Lots of vehicles. (Airplanes are handled disgustingly).
The environments are rich and vibrant.

The game has microtransactions - for a singleplayer game, this is disgusting and unacceptable.