Far Cry: New Dawn

Seventeen years ago, the world was devastated in an unexpected nuclear war. People are attempting to rebuild, but they are at the mercy of raiders and pirates. One remote community in Hope County, Montana are under siege by a group of thugs known as the Highwaymen. To survive, they call for support from a group determined to rebuild civilisation. Forming an alliance, they reluctantly conclude to stop the Highwaymen they need the help of a third faction...the surviving members of the cult known as Eden's Gate. An alliance of convenience needs to be formed to drive out the lawlessness, and put right what went wrong a long time ago.

Far Cry: New Dawn is the latest game in the Far Cry series (at least until the release of Far Cry 6 later this year) and is the third stand-alone expansion in the series. Ubisoft are determined to get the maximum worth of their development money from this series, so for the last three titles in the franchise they've re-used the previous game's map and set about creating new story from the same source material. Blood Dragon drew on Far Cry 3's map and design, though in a different genre, whilst Primal re-used Far Cry 4's map in a visit to the Stone Age of tens of thousands of years earlier. New Dawn similarly repurposes the map and many of the assets, flora and fauna of 2018's Far Cry 5, but this time in a direct sequel, if not a continuation, of the former game.

Far Cry 5 had a rough reception, with fans and critics praising its graphics, stealth and combat but criticising its bitty, poorly-characterised story, incomprehensible pacing decisions designed to make playing the game as obnoxious as possible and its utterly surreal, non-sequitur ending. Having played New Dawn at least some of the problems are now much clearer: Far Cry 5 is a narratively incomplete game that punts its proper finale off to this sequel, which oddly was not mentioned anywhere in the marketing on release and one feels it perhaps should have been.

New Dawn at least acknowledges some of the criticisms of its forebear. You'll be happy to know that at exactly no point in this game are you inexplicably kidnapped from a helicopter a thousand feet in the air, surrounded by allies, by the bad guys who then inexplicably let you live to murder all of them later on. If you don't want to follow the main story and just want to dick around in the open world shooting rabbits, you are free to do that with no penalty. The game, belatedly, understands that an open-world game means giving the player the choice to do what they want to do, when they want to, and backs off from ramming its narrative down your throat.

That said, the story is somewhat more coherent and interesting this time around, though not exactly original. You are called in to help build the town of Prosperity up and defend it from attack. You can upgrade its walls and services, such as a helipad, herb-growing garden and medical facilities. These not only make the town more defensible, but also impact on yourself: in a nice touch, upgrading Prosperity upgrades your own stats, so updating the medical facility means you enlarge your own health bar. At various points you can take on a main story objective to push the story forwards, although be warned that the storyline is quite short and pushing forwards with it too decisively will make the experience end relatively quickly.

The moment-to-moment gameplay is very similar to Far Cry 5. You'll be attacking outposts and capturing them for the resistance, seizing their supplies to improve your own war machine. In a nice touch, you can now abandon outposts and let them be re-taken by the enemy, so you can attack them again and get even more supplies (including the very rare ethanol, which is needed to upgrade Prosperity's facilities). Every time you do this, the outpost is refortified even more heavily than before, creating an escalating sense of challenge. There are also plenty of much smaller sites of interest you can investigate and ransack for supplies, often with some stories to discover along the way via notes and audio logs.

Although the game uses the Far Cry 5 map, it's a now a post-apocalyptic setting (with some surface similarities to the Fallout series). Some parts of the map are no longer accessible, having taken direct hits from nukes at the end of the first game and now covered in radiation, whilst the wildlife has been mildly mutated. Some areas are now flooded. The most striking change are flowers, which are now coloured purple and give the landscape a dramatically different look and feel, even though the topography is identical. Newer buildings have been erected in areas where in Far Cry 5 there was only grassland or forest, whilst older buildings from the previous game are now overgrown or partially collapsed. The new feel to the game is quite well-done, and exploration feels more rewarding.

Stealth and combat is still the cornerstone of the Far Cry experience and both are reasonably well-handled, with satisfying gunplay and the relative scarcity of supplies making some old tactics a bit harder to implement; there is no silenced sniper rifle in the first weapons tier, meaning it'll be a while before you get your hands on one, which encourages a change in tactics. NPC allies are also less overpowered than they were in Far Cry 5, meaning no more calling in tactical air strikes to wipe out an outpost before you wander in and take it over. However, I did encounter more problems with hitboxes in New Dawn than any prior game in the series; several times sniper bullets went straight through enemies without harming them, which is a very strange problem, one not present in earlier games in the series (including the near-identical Far Cry 5).

To pump out its otherwise short playing time, the game has the usual roster of activities (including hunting and combat challenges, a small number of treasure hunts, stealing enemy fuel tankers, freeing prisoners etc) enhanced by a new idea: Expeditions. These are short, focused missions taking place in completely new locations off the main map. These include objectives like assaulting a beached aircraft carrier captured by the enemy; salvaging the crashed International Space Station; and ejecting enemies from a flooded amusement park in Louisiana (which I was not aware was in comfortable helicopter range of Montana, but okay). These are fun missions, but surprisingly easy and with very few enemies to fight off. In fact, it's completely doable to just rush to the objective, then to the evac zone without even engaging the enemy (perhaps only to fend them off whilst waiting for the chopper to arrive). I discovered later on that this is because the missions are supposed to be repeated like the outposts, with each mission getting a lot harder each time. This way they get 21 Expeditions out of just 7 locations (the same as getting 30 outpost missions out of just 10 outpost locations). I kind of respect the idea - getting the most out of limited and expensive assets is sensible - but in practice it means that you're not seeing these locations at their best the first time you visit them, which doesn't give much reason to return. You can also satisfyingly finish the game by visiting each Expedition location only once and doing the Outpost cycle maybe twice at best.

Eventually, once you've upgraded Prosperity, retaken the outposts a couple of times and completed all the Expeditions, you can press on with the story. As with most Far Cry games, the writers have tried to create iconic villains, this time around a duo of dastardly sisters, Lou and Mickey. They're better adversaries than Far Cry 5's godawful Seed family but still not that particularly interesting. Even worse, the game brings back the aforementioned godawful Seed family in its closing chapters, which I could have done without. Still, at least New Dawn rounds off this most tedious of storylines for good.

New Dawn is not a long game - seeing everything of interest in the game will take you south of 25 hours - but it does pack a more condensed and focused version of the Far Cry experience into an accessible package. It's not as obnoxious as Far Cry 5, and its combat and core gameplay loop is fairly enjoyable. However, it is straining at the limitations of obvious budgetary and time limitations, forcing you to repeat mission tasks and locations rather than just giving you more mission and locations of interest. I'm also not a huge fan of the developers using New Dawn to fix problems from Far Cry 5 instead of fixing the mothership game itself, although I suppose this is better than the problems going resolutely unignored.

Far Cry: New Dawn (***½) is a solid, medium-sized entry to the series and provides a good few hours of enjoyable action gameplay. However, the format that the series has employed through no less than six games since Far Cry 3 is starting to creak from overfamiliarity, and it'll be interesting to see if the forthcoming Far Cry 6 can freshen things up at all. The game is available now on PC, X-Box One and PlayStation 4.

Far Cry 5

Reports of crimes being carried out in Hope County, Montana, by a religious group known as the Project at Eden's Gate has led to an investigation by the US Marshals. A group sets out to arrest the cult's leader, Joseph Seed, only to find themselves outgunned and forced to flee. The cult locks down Hope County, triggering a small-scale conflict between the religious fanatics and the local, well-armed populace. With the outside world curiously uninterested in the conflict, it falls to one of the US Marshals to organise the locals and take the fight to Joseph Seed and his followers.

The Far Cry series has, to date, delighted in taking players to far-flung corners of the globe. Far Cry and Far Cry 3 were set on remote islands, Far Cry 2 visited Africa and Far Cry 4 took place in the Himalayas. Far Cry: Primal was set in the Stone Age and Far Cry: Blood Dragon was a neon-drenched SF fantasy. Far Cry 5 differs from its forebears by bringing the game home (to many players), to the United States itself. This immediately adds an element of familiarity to the game: no longer are you an interloper, a visitor to strange lands (apart from the fourth game, where you played a native returning home after a long absence), but the people, the landscape and the culture are immediately more familiar.

Also familiar is the gameplay. The Far Cry apple has not fallen far from the tree at all. Once again, you have a large map which is covered in icons directing you to missions, side-quests, optional activities, enemy strongholds and various characters. There are multiple rebel factions - three in this case - and you can help them defeat the bad guys and eventually win the war. There are some changes to the formula, though. The increasingly silly towers you had to climb to open up each new region have disappeared and the game now tries to be more organic in how it presents you information: rebel soldiers will talk about a missing ally or rumours of another outpost which adds that information to the map; stealing maps from enemy strongholds will also open up more information about the world. Far Cry 5 tries to be a more dynamic game in how you find out information rather than following the same old Ubisoft formula yet again.

Still, these improvements are fairly minor and not entirely successful: it is far, far easier now than in previous games to simply miss stories, side-quests and characters, which is rather bizarre. More interesting is the decision to mix and match ideas from previous games. Unexpectedly, this game reaches back to tap the Far Cry 2 idea of "buddies", special characters you can recruit (usually by doing missions for them) at key moments in the game and then summon them to help you out later on. They can be injured in battle, but you can revive them and vice versa. The game can also be played co-op, with the two players taking on similar roles in helping each other out. It's a nice idea which is often hilarious - your potential buddy pool includes a dog, a diabetic bear and a puma - but is also overpowered. One of your buddies is a pilot and helps you out from the air, allowing you to simply ask him to bomb the living hell out of an enemy compound before waltzing in to claim it. The enemy AI is also often bewildered by attacks coming from different angles and can be divided and eliminated very easily even on the hardest difficulty settings. Helicopters are also monstrously powerful: you can take out and liberate an outpost in seconds using a chopper whilst going in on foot might result in a solid quarter of an hour of infiltration, combat, takedowns and dealing with reinforcements.

Gunplay and combat is pretty satisfying. The Far Cry series is the biggest-selling story-focused first-person shooter series of all time, with sales of well over 40 million. Shooting is solid, the new helicopter controls are excellent and combat is the usual mix of long-distance spying and recon followed by the rush of attacking outright, with perhaps the occasional stealthy infiltration thrown in to mix things up a bit.

Far Cry 5's trump card is its upgraded and severely enhanced graphics engine. The game is gorgeous, comfortably the best-looking game in existence right now. The forests are breathtakingly atmospheric, water and fire effects are incredible, and the game is often a joy to simply wander around on foot, on quad bike or by boat. Far Cry 5's map is not particularly large, but it does mix in a nice transition from the mountainous north to the flatter south, covered by vast farms, and the heavily forested east. The environments of this game are fantastic.

So good combat and nice environments to fight in, and this goes some way to making Far Cry 5 a very worthwhile purchase. But then the game not so much falters as falls over and bursts into flames.

Far Cry 5 is an open-world game, which means it's up to you where you go, what missions you tackle and what optional activities you partake in. If you want to get through the main story as fast as possible, you can do that in about 15 hours or so, but if you exhaustively want to do everything you can in the game you can comfortably triple that. But the problem is that the game seems to get antsy if you go more than five seconds without something happening. Enemies are spawned constantly, with cars and trucks materialising (sometimes quite literally a few feet away, which is disconcerting) on the road in front of you, cultists on quad bikes appearing on the dirt tracks and hostile wildlife such as bears roaming the woods. Far worse is when the game's story decide it's sat on the sidelines for too long and decides to railroad you into the next chapter of the game.

This is extraordinarily frustrating. Killing enemies, liberating outposts, and destroying cult shrines and vehicles all adds to a "freedom meter". At key points this meter will trigger the next part of the game's story. Unless you commit to not killing enemies when attacked and simply running away something interesting happens, there's no way to avoid filling up this meter and thus continue the story. Even worse, almost every major story event in the game requires you to be kidnapped, which is...ridiculous. You can be kidnapped at random, anywhere, any time, even from the cockpit of a helicopter 2,000 feet up with two buddies sitting right next to you. You wake up in an enemy base and have to escape. This happens nine times in the game. Why don't the cult just kill you outright? No idea. One of the game's three mini-bosses is kind of trying to use you for their own ends and it sort of makes sense they'd spare you, but the other two should have killed you without a nanosecond's hesitation. That Austin Powers scene with Scott offering to go get a gun comes to mind repeatedly.


It doesn't help that Far Cry 5 is badly written - the three mini-bosses and the main villain howl Biblical quotations and cliches at you in the most predictable manner possible, and your allies rarely say anything that sounds like a real human would remotely say - and largely lacking in memorable characters. Far Cry 3 and 4 had great villains in the form of Vaas and Pagan Min, but the Seed family are mind-numbingly tedious in comparison. The much-vaunted "topicality" of the game also never appears, and the game fails to say anything interesting or original about the US or the current political moment in history at all. This is probably for the best, but it does row back on some of the pre-release marketing.

A word must be reserved for Far Cry 5's ending, which is comfortably the most illogical, bizarre and incongruous conclusion* to a major game franchise since Mass Effect 3's. The ending relies on you listening to radio messages at key moments in the game, but if you aren't near a radio or if the radio is turned off, you won't hear the messages. Even worse, that excuse is undone by you having contact with a senior American intelligence agent who, you'd assume, would be in the know about what was going on but clearly isn't. Like Mass Effect 3 before it, the ending of Far Cry 5 makes you feel like everything you did in the preceding 15+ hours was utterly worthless and pointless, leaving a bad taste in the mouth and little urge to replay the game or even finish off the remaining side-quests (the game generates a save set before the ending so you can go back and address unfinished business if you want).

Another issue that Far Cry 5 has to deal with, and does so badly, is the increasing muddling of the series focus from game to game and the threat of the competition. The Far Cry franchise's "thing", the thing it does better than anything else, is first-person combat in a freeform setting far away from linear corridors, realised with cutting-edge graphics. However, feature creep has seen side-quests, animal-taming and hunting, buggy-racing and, in this game, helicopter gunships and even fighter planes added to the mix, to the point where the series feels like it wants, badly, to be Grand Theft Auto. This doesn't play to the series strengths and makes the game feel more generic. Another major problem, much moreso for Far Cry 5 than any previous game in the series, is the looming presence of the Just Cause series. Just Cause 3 does everything that Far Cry 5 does, including having aircraft, helicopters, rebel armies you lead into battle, chaos meters, base assaults, and does it better in a far larger and more varied world, with a much greater sense of fun and no story barging in and seizing control away from you once an hour or so. Far Cry 5 has better graphics and psychopathic bear companions, but that's about it. On every other front, you shouldn't even think about checking out Far Cry 5 without trying Avalanche's action-comedy epic first.

So, Far Cry 5 is a beautiful, stunning-looking game with very good and solid combat, and some great moments like rushing into battle with a friendly diabetic bear named Cheeseburger. It is also bizarrely at its best when it's at its quietest and most peaceful. But the story is garbage and doesn't make an iota of sense, which would be bearable if the plot doesn't continuously keep pushing itself in your face whilst you're playing whether you want it to or not. It's a game that plays bait and switch with you constantly and which takes control away from you and pushes you into doing things you don't want to. Never before have I played a game that's so good when it's good and so appallingly obnoxious when it's terrible, before rounding off things with an ending which is a giant, smirking middle finger to the player.

Far Cry 5 (***) is a deeply frustrating game which does so much right and then not so much shoots itself in the foot as blows both feet off with a rocket launcher. A very cautious try before you buy, or wait for the budget version (and hopefully a mod or patch that eventually mitigates the game's worst excesses).

The game is available now on PC, PlayStation 4 (UK, USA) and X-Box One (UK, USA). Three DLC expansions are due for release later this year, although like Blood Dragon they will be fantastical episodes set outside of series canon.


* Although a Far Cry 6 seems likely, based on Far Cry 5's early and impressive sales, the ending of 5 suggests it will be a very different kind of setting. I'll try to get a more thorough analysis of the game's bizarre ending in another post.