Far Cry New Dawn Reviews

Far Cry 5 has been on the shelves for less than a year and we are already spoiled with another game in the series. Far Cry: New Dawn is not a full-fledged part, but a direct sequel to the numerical fifth part in the series. New Dawn was unveiled at the Game Awards and many a gamer who hadn't played Far Cry 5 was quite sour about the way this happened. In this announcement, Ubisoft revealed the quite spectacular ending of part 5. To prevent the same here, I would therefore like to warn that this review will contain spoilers of the story of Far Cry 5.

Now that that's out of the way, I can safely say that New Dawn takes place 17 years after Far Cry 5's explosive ending, making that ending canon. Joseph Seed blew the world to pieces with an atomic bomb and almost wiped out the entire population. Again, you play as a silent protagonist who, at the age of 6, takes his first look outside the nuclear bunker to restore Hope County to its former glory. Soon you come into contact with the Highwaymen; a band of bandits led by two Beyoncés. These twins, named Mickey and Lou, do not agree with your plans and therefore blow up the train that contains almost all of your people. A few survive, and this is where Far Cry: New Dawn begins.

A new look at Hope County
Although New Dawn is set in Far Cry 5's Hope County, the world is almost unrecognizable from ancient times. Of course you see famous sights and other landmarks here and there, but almost all villages and towns are buried under a thick layer of sand. Beautifully colored flowers sprout from the ground everywhere and in the sky all kinds of colors and rainbows can be seen almost at all times. Where these kind of broken worlds often look dark and gray, Hope County in New Dawn has turned into a beautiful, cheerful post-apocalyptic playground. One of the criticisms we had of the previous part was that the beautiful world was difficult to capture without 'photo mode'. Fortunately, Ubisoft has listened to that and New Dawn knows one. Quite an extensive one.

Short joy
Since Far Cry: New Dawn is a direct sequel to part five, it is not surprising that a few old acquaintances make an appearance. This is how we find out what happened to Joseph Seed after Far Cry 5's explosive ending, and see him return more often in the story than the new bad guys. It is therefore quite a shame that New Dawn's story is short. After about fifteen hours you have seen all the story content, which is about half the length of a full-fledged Far Cry game. In addition, the flow of the story is also interrupted in an Assassin's Creed Odyssey-like way, where you can only continue with the story missions when you have conquered an x number of outposts to collect fuel. This does ensure that outposts are involved in the main story of the game this time and are therefore partly no longer optional – outposts in earlier parts therefore added little – but at the same time it is just a trick to artificially extend the playing time of the story.

Bullet sponges
The story of Far Cry: New Dawn takes a special and unexpected turn towards the end of the game. Although this is all well thought out, the effect is unfortunately less. For example, the bosses are particularly poorly designed and we wonder whether the creator of these boss fights ever had fun playing a video game. No one likes overpowered bullet sponges that summon reinforcements every three seconds and send countless dogs at you when you're just reloading your weapons. With the last boss, we totally got the feeling that at Ubisoft they simply looked at a game like Dark Souls, which led them to think that people nowadays like bosses with a million hit points that take you to 1 HP with one attack and then - even more. before you can do anything – jump on top of you so you can start all over again with this excruciating boss battle. We played the game on medium difficulty with almost all weapons and quite a few upgrades at our disposal, and still these battles were boring and unnecessarily tedious. And that's a shame, because with this they get a lot of fun out of playing New Dawn.

Little news
Fun that you will not find in the creativity behind New Dawn. Take the guns, for example. They all look cool and seem to come straight from your hillbilly second cousin's toolbox, but except for a stray buzz saw shooter, they're almost all pretty standard weapons. Only this time they are littered with lights, rubber bands and other odds and ends to make them look unique. Pretty special. New Dawn is set in a post-apocalyptic world where mutant demonfish swim in the water and a secret substance influences people to do the strangest antics, but the arsenal of weapons doesn't go much beyond shotguns, machine guns, snipers and rocket launchers. Also in terms of mission structure, New Dawn does not differ much from part 5. Most missions are not much more than driving to a camp and killing everyone there, after which you get to see a cutscene, and occasionally you can enjoy a trippy 'vision quest'-like hallucination. Far Cry must of course remain Far Cry. But if you create such a radiant, colorful setting, the missions could also be a bit livelier. Killing a big bear with your bare hands is fun, but it can all be a bit crazier, a bit more creative, a bit more 'out of the box'.

AI without a personality
A big criticism we had of the previous part was the AI. Especially your helpers. And we can say that literally nothing has changed. Your sidekicks still have the IQ of a roasted pear, and have learned literally nothing in the 17 years between Far Cry 5 and New Dawn. For example, one of your helpers is a stealth guy with a bow and arrow. If you send it at an enemy, it will stand five meters in front of it and half the time it won't even shoot an arrow. If you have been shot and need your sidekick to bring you back to life, you can hope that he will come to you, because more than half of the times he just walked away from us or just stood still; after which we bled to death and were allowed to start the mission again.

They also still drive into trees, fly into buildings with a helicopter and keep flying against the roof and so on. You can choose to exchange your artificial sidekick for a flesh-and-blood warrior by inviting a friend through co-op, but this works exactly the same as in Far Cry 5. Only the host earns progression , which means that the person who comes to the rescue gets to do it all over again in their own game. It all works fine, but it is not optimal for the person who comes to help.

Surprisingly bug free
While the developer seems to have made little improvement to the underlying code from the original, we have to say that this has been the most bug-free experience with a Ubisoft game in recent years. The game never crashed, we didn't fall through the floor or a brick, and while the tracking missions are still slow and annoying, the NPCs always seem to get to the destination. The strangest thing we encountered in New Dawn was literally the first man we encountered in the open world, who was crying next to a corpse, and as soon as we spoke to him he stopped crying and told me in a normal voice that one story. After each sentence he continued to cry until we spoke to him again. At the time of writing, there are already two patches available for New Dawn that fix quite a few problems, so don't forget to install these patches before starting the game.

Great music, few songs
Where New Dawn lags a bit behind other games is the soundtrack. Don't get me wrong, the choice of music in New Dawn is fantastic. There is clearly someone with a heart for abstract hip-hop in the sound team of Far Cry: New Dawn, because the Highwaymen only listen to acts like Run The Jewels, Action Bronson and even Die Answer. It's incredibly cool to sneak through the woods at night in search of adventure, to hear Yolandi Visser's shrill voice echoing from a cheap speaker in the distance and you immediately know that you have to prepare for a gunfight. What the game gets stuck on is the amount of songs. Soon you start hearing tracks on the radio that played half an hour ago, and while you can find several tapes in the world that unlock new music, the total number of tracks just isn't enough to play the whole game. to feel fresh for a long time. Too bad, because New Dawn has enough optional content in addition to the main story to extend the game's playing time considerably. Think of the standard things like side missions, fishing, hunting, collecting collectibles and so on. That this has to happen with the same handful of songs in the background that you've been listening to for fifteen hours is just a missed opportunity.

In the oven
Although at the reveal of Far Cry: New Dawn we had the idea that Ubisoft had listened to the critics of part 5 and they would take a completely different tack, in reality New Dawn turns out to be, except for the setting. to be a pretty safe sequel. It's certainly a cool game and even without having played part 5 you can get enough fun out of this sequel, but just like Assassin's Creed, the Far Cry franchise can actually be in the oven for a few years. It really doesn't have to be a crazy, over the top, chaotic game, but the formula is just finished. We said it at part 5 and we say it again at New Dawn; it really is more of the same. People who have played 5 and expect a completely new game due to the fresh look will be disappointed, but someone who hasn't played a game in the series for a while can find enough beautiful things in New Dawn.

Conclusion
Far Cry: New Dawn hasn't gotten the creative boost the franchise needs. It's mostly more of the same. And while that's not a problem for many gamers, it's not neat to disguise the shorter game time by hiding story missions behind 'optional' content. New Dawn comes to the shelves for a budget price, but you really get a budget adventure in return.