FAR CRY: NEW DAWN
This dawn isn’t that new, but it does sun things right
“YOU NEED TO STUFF YOUR TARDISLIKE POCKETS WITH MATERIALS WHEREVER YOU FIND THEM.”
People who enjoy a) Far Cry 5 and b) recycling will be very happy with this game; New Dawn uses the same open world as its precursor. Not exactly the same, to be fair – old structures are ruined, missing, or inaccessible, and there are lots of cars sticking out of the ground vertically for some reason – but it’s similar enough to be cheeky. The story, you see, follows on from the last game. Somebody carelessly dropped a few nuclear bombs and made a terrible mess. You enter the scene a few decades later, after the survivors have crawled out of their bunkers and rebuilt things the best they can. There’s a new bunch of baddies in the form of the “Highwaymen”, led by twin sisters Mickey and Lou. Needless to say, you soon take it upon yourself to pretty much single-handedly sort things out.
If you’re expecting Far Cry Fallout – don’t. This isn’t a convincing post-apocalyptic world. There are plenty of buildings, vehicles, weapons, healthy fields (and suspiciously tall, and therefore old, trees), and perfectly normal animals. Nobody seems concerned about things like fuel, ammo, food, water, or radiation.
APOCALYPSE SERVICE
The post-nuclear backdrop is, however, used as an excuse to put a heavy emphasis on resources. Weapons, vehicles, and enemies are graded, lootbox-style, across four tiers. Try to take on an Elite enemy using a common weapon of any kind, and it won’t end well for you. You can harvest weapons from fallen bad guys, but these will almost always be pretty shabby. You’ll therefore need to stuff your TARDIS-like pockets with materials wherever you find them. Expect to hold down r to pick something up a lot.
This isn’t as bad as it might sound. There’s no denying that you need a huge amount of
materials to craft the best cars and guns, but once they’re unlocked you have them forever, and can spawn them at any relevant point on the map. You just need to be picky about what you craft first. And although it took several hours for us to feel powerful, encounters with overpowered enemies before then were few and far between.
TURRET’S SYNDROME
At approximately 10 to 12 hours, the story is shorter than Far Cry fans are used to (a good thing, many would argue). Breathe a sigh of relief, for unlike the previous game, you will never be press-ganged into a story event while exploring. While story missions tend to be a little better – and less restrictive – than those in the last game, they’re still not great. There’s nothing to surprise anybody who’s played an FPS within the last ten years. Jump on a turret, rescue this person, jump on a turret, go undercover, obligatory slow motion sequence, jump on a turret, etc.
The story itself is something of a lost cause. It’s full of clichés and hollow characters, people and situations that it’s impossible to become invested in. There are several callbacks to the last game, though these are meaningless if you haven’t played it. Things become very silly in chapter two and never recover, yet Ubisoft insists on taking everything seriously. It’s like watching a clown read the news deadpan.
That’s a shame because, on the rare occasions that the scriptwriters are allowed to go goofy, smiles are had and dull tasks are more easily forgiven (Sharky’s recruitment mission is a perfect example of both). More generally speaking, it’s fairly easy to move from one location to another without being harassed by enemies (unlike in Far Cry 5), but this comes at a cost. Random events such as prisoners to rescue are surprisingly rare, and the world can often feel indifferent to your presence between curated activities. Speaking of which, there are still outposts to capture, but now doing that has an interesting twist.
Ethanol is the currency with which you upgrade your base which, in turn, dictates things such as your maximum health and the kind of weapons you can craft. Capturing an outpost gives you a little ethanol. Should you choose to ‘scavenge’ it, you get a little more… and the outpost is relinquished to the enemy, who will install more alarms and send tougher guards. Recapture it for a bigger boost of ethanol, and repeat a few more times until it’s as tough as it can get. You can keep doing this as much as you like, and capturing a toptier outpost undetected is as satisfying as it is difficult.
AI AI… OH
“NOTHING TO SURPRISE ANYBODY WHO’S PLAYED AN FPS IN THE LAST TEN YEARS.”
Outposts are perfect stages for strategy, but also perfect stages for showing the limitations of the AI. While enemies are ordinarily dangerously competent, they’ll occasionally
determinedly try to walk through a big rock, or fail to notice a corpse falling a few feet behind them. Friendly AI doesn’t fare much better. Order it to attack an enemy just a little too far away, and you may find that the character runs and shuffles around in a circle for a while before returning to their original position, like a dog waiting to be let out for a poo.
Another disappointment is the online options or, more accurately, the almost complete lack thereof. PvP, custom missions, and map editing and sharing are all gone. All there is is online co-op, and even then there’s no matchmaking. You can only play with somebody on your friends list, which is, frankly, a bit odd. The inclusion of Expeditions, custom maps where you must locate and extract a package to obtain rare materials (incidentally, primarily intended for said co-op), is far from a sufficient replacement.
One thing New Dawn does superbly, however, is prevent player fatigue. After the first dozen hours, you feel empowered, you’re comfortable with the rhythm of outpost captures, and there’s still plenty for you to do. Which weapon or vehicle will you hunt materials for next? That double jump you’ve unlocked will come in handy for the treasure hunt you couldn’t quite finish. And so on. New Dawn smooths out enough Far Cry edges to be forgiven its minor (but numerous) failings, and tinkers with things just enough to raise eyebrows in the right kinds of ways. Now, how easily can you take down a Monstrous Bison with an Epic assault rifle?
VERDICT
Not the best Far Cry, but not quite the worst, either. (That’s still Primal.) Allowing itself a sense of humour more often could have pushed it further up the list. Luke Kemp