The Falcon and the Winter Soldier: Season 1

The Avengers have saved the world, but at a heavy cost. In the aftermath of the "Blip," life is returning to normal and those who vanished from the world for five years are having to work hard to find their way back into life, including Sam Wilson and Bucky Barnes. Sam has been left the mantle of Captain America but has not felt worthy to accept it, and is conflicted when the US government asks another soldier to step up. Barnes is trying to atone for the evil he did as the super-assassin known as the Winter Soldier. When a new threat arises, Wilson and Barnes reluctantly team up to tackle it.

The Falcon and the Winter Soldier was originally slated as the first Disney+ original series set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and actually created by the same team who worked on the movies, but COVID filming restrictions and rumoured extensive reshoots delayed it until after the debut of WandaVision. In the original plan you can see Falcon and Winter Soldier giving audiences a big, Marvel-style action spectacle before hitting them with the much weirder and more metafictional WandaVision, but circumstances reversed that order, which worked to WandaVision's benefit - a bolder, more original and stranger show than many were expecting - and unfortunately to Falcon and Winter Soldier's detriment.

That's not to say it's a terrible show. It's very competently written on a scene-by-scene basis and the cast are mostly excellent, from a returning Anthony Mackie and Sebastian Stan as the titular stars to the also-returning Daniel Bruhl and Emily VanCamp (both last seen in Captain America: Civil War as Baron Zemo and Sharon Carter). Wyatt Russell is splendidly annoying as the "new" Captain America, John Walker, and Erin Kellyman gives a measured, interesting performance as antagonist Karli Morgenthau.

The show's problems are mostly structural and its attempt to pack too much material into just six episodes. The series tries to be a societal commentary on Sam Wilson becoming the first black Captain America, despite his guilt when he learns what happened to other African-American members of the super-serum project after WWII, whilst exploring the psychological trauma Bucky is dealing with as a former HYDRA stooge and assassin. However, the show also tries to be a Rush Hour/48 Hours/Lethal Weapon-style buddy comedy, a villainous psychological study of both Zemo and Karli, a spy mystery about Sharon Carter and a commentary on immigration and borders. It's too much for the limited screentime and some of these plots are only dealt with briefly and not really mentioned again, like why Sam - a world-famous crime-fighting superhero who helped save the universe and is friends with people like the billionaire owner of Stark Industries - is now broke.

The series is on surer ground when the story focuses in on the two Avengers tackling enemy terrorists or dealing with off-brand WalMart Captain America's anger-management issues. The action sequences are generally quite good, and the visual effects outstanding, even if the opening set-piece of Sam taking down a helicopter sets a level the rest of the series can't really live up to (the expense of that sequence may explain why most of the other big action set-pieces happen at night).

What we're left with is a pretty solid story, but one which can lose focus for stretches of time in an attempt to tackle too many subplots and themes and ends up not really satisfyingly delivering on any them. Still, it does continue WandaVision's exploration of the Blip and how half the world's population vanishing for five years and then returning is a really huge deal rather than something to be brushed under the carpet and moved on from instantly.

Solid performances and outstanding action sequences make the one and only season of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier* (***½) worth watching, but an odd structure and rushed storytelling means it doesn't land as well as it should, and certainly not as engagingly as either of its sister shows in the first wave of MCU TV series, WandaVision and Loki. The show is available worldwide now on Disney+.

* A second season, should it materialise, would be made under the moniker Captain America and the Winter Soldier instead, apparently.

Next STAR TREK film lands WANDAVISION director, gets green light

Paramount's next Star Trek feature film has hooked WandaVision director Matt Shakman to helm the feature.

Paramount has spent five years playing musical chairs with writers, directors and even castmembers for the follow-up to 2016's Star Trek Beyond. Quentin Tarantino and Noah Hawley both developed scripts, J.J. Abrams signed on and off as producer several times and even the film's setting and cast changed several times, with Paramount considering everything from a film featuring a completely new crew and ship unrelated to any previous version of the franchise to a remake of the classic series episode A Piece of the Action to a straight-up sequel to the previous movies, with Chris Pine's Kirk returning.

Paramount have now greenlit a completely new project, with a script by Lindsey Beer and Geneva Robertson, with Shakman signed up after he guided WandaVision to a startling 23-Emmy nomination haul. It is still unclear if this new script will see the return of the Chris Pine-led "Kelvin" timeline but that should hopefully be clarified soon as casting announcements are made. Paramount wants to fast-track the movie with shooting to start no later than Spring 2022. The film, the fourteenth overall in the franchise, already has a pencilled-in release date of 9 July 2023. J.J. Abrams will return to produce.

Meanwhile, work on the next TV instalments of the franchise are continuing. Animated series Star Trek: Lower Decks and Prodigy are expected to drop over the summer, whilst Season 4 of Discovery is gearing up for an autumn launch, ahead of Picard's second season in early 2022 and Strange New Worlds' first season a few months later.

Relic Entertainment announces COMPANY OF HEROES 3

Relic Entertainment have announced a third full game in their Company of Heroes real-time strategy series.

Company of Heroes 3 is the follow-up to the original Company of Heroes (2006), which focused on the campaign in Normandy, and Company of Heroes 2 (2013), which depicted events on the Eastern Front. This time the game focuses on the Mediterranean Theatre, with a campaign which takes in battles in North Africa, Sicily and Italy, with the Allies versus the German Wehrmacht. The theatre was selected after discussions between Relic and fans on their forums (presumably at the expense of the Pacific, which we can guess will form the basis of a future fourth game).

Unlike the previous games, which had a linear story-based campaign, Company of Heroes 3 has a dynamic, non-linear campaign which unfolds on a large campaign map, similar to the Total War series (both Relic and Total War developers Creative Assembly are owned by Sega). Players can deploy and move units on the campaign map and use things like naval support and air power to clear the way for the ground forces to advance. Standard real-time battles unfold when ground forces meet in combat. This mode was previewed in the previous Ardennes Assault expansion for Company of Heroes 2, but CoH3 develops the idea in a lot more depth.

The actual battles are now brighter and sunnier, taking place in the desert or on the Mediterranean shore, and there is more focus on detailed infantry combat. Units can fortify buildings as before but they can also breach and storm fortified buildings. Single-player mode has a new "tactical pause" feature which allows players to pause the game and issue orders, a familiar technique from other strategy games but a first for this series.

Allied players will now get rewards for minimising collateral damage to civilian buildings, such as gaining intel from grateful locals or recruiting partisans to add extra firepower to their units. Allied players will also be able to sortie American or British forces, or on some missions a mixture of the two.

Company of Heroes 3 will launch in late 2022, though players will be able to take part in a pre-alpha demo study starting today.

WHEEL OF TIME prequel movie trilogy in development

In surprising news, Radar Pictures have put a Wheel of Time prequel movie series into active development. Zack Stentz (Thor, X-Men: First Class) is writing a script based on the Age of Legends, a major formative event in the backstory to the novels. This project is (so far) unaffiliated with Amazon Prime Television's Wheel of Time TV series, based directly on the novels, and expected to debut in a few months.

Red Eagle Entertainment secured the screen rights to The Wheel of Time in 2004, in a deal with novelist Robert Jordan (who passed away in 2007). Red Eagle spent eleven years developing film and TV projects based on the novels with multiple partners, including Warner Brothers and later Chris Morgan (The Fast and the Furious franchise) at Universal Studios, to no avail. In 2014 Red Eagle teamed with the experienced Radar Pictures to develop a television pitch for Sony. This deal was deep in negotiation when Red Eagle's time limitation on the rights expired in 2015; to keep the rights they developed a self-funded short film called The Winter Dragon. This led to a brief legal case, after which Red Eagle and Radar Pictures retained the screen rights to the franchise. In 2016 the TV rights to the novels were sub-licensed to Sony. Sony partnered with Amazon in 2017 to bring the novels to television, with production beginning in 2019. It is this project, led by Rafe Judkins, which is expected to hit the screens in a few months and has just started shooting its second season.

However, Red Eagle and Radar have retained the ability to develop other parts of the franchise. A few years ago this would have been meaningless - the fifteen Wheel of Time novels (the fourteen main books and the New Spring prequel volume) are the main appeal, obviously - but we've seen an explosion of screen projects based on notes, outlines and thin or non-existent source material in recent times. Both Amazon Television's new Lord of the Rings TV series, set in the Second Age of Middle-earth's history, and Warner Brothers' War of the Rohirrim animated film are based on notes and outlines left behind by J.R.R. Tolkien rather than actual novels. HBO's House of the Dragon TV series is based on a couple of chapters in George R.R. Martin's "fake history" of Westeros and Essos, Fire and Blood, rather than a full novel (though they have the benefit of being able to call on Martin for advice), and several other spin-off projects in development are based on even less. Netflix has developed a Witcher animated film and a full prequel mini-series which they've had to create from scratch (though again they've been able to enlist novelist Andrzej Sapkowski as a consultant). Sony and Amazon are probably kicking themselves at not securing the full screen rights to the franchise at an earlier date.

The movie trilogy appears to be adapting the primary backstory event in the history of the novels: the War of the Shadow. The books depict the Age of Legends as a time of peace and prosperity with humanity using the One Power - a highly regimented form of sorcery - to create a utopia of equality and prosperity. However, an experiment into using the Power goes awry, letting a force of profound evil enter the world. Society gradually collapses over the course of a century, leading into a devastating global war which kills billions. Eventually, under the leadership of Lews Therin Telamon, the man nicknamed "The Dragon," humanity is victorious and seals the source of evil away again, but at the moment of triumph the male half of the One Power is corrupted, sending every male channeller (magic-user) insane on the instant, devastating the world in their madness. The female-led Aes Sedai emerge in the aftermath of this chaos to restore order to the world. The events of the Wheel of Time novel series take place some 3,400 years later, by which time humanity has managed to drag itself back to a semi-Renaissance level of technology and development, but the return of the "Dragon Reborn" (Lews Therin's reincarnation) and a renewed War of the Shadow looms large over the world.

Screenwriter Zack Stentz has some reasonable form, co-writing the screenplays to Thor and X-Men: First Class (both in 2011), as well as co-writing Agent Cody Banks and writing Netflix's Rim of the World. He has also written multiple episodes of Andromeda, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Fringe, The Flash and Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous.

So far the project is only in development; Radar will have to find a major studio partner to provide the immense budget such as project would need, and that might only be viable once the TV show debuts and if it is a success.

HOUSE OF THE DRAGON adds two new castmembers

Game of Thrones prequel/spin-off show House of the Dragon has added two new actresses.

Milly Alcock (Reckoning, The Gloaming, Fighting Season) and Emily Carey (Wonder Woman, Get Even) are playing younger versions of Rhaenyra Targaryen and Alicent Hightower, respectively. Emma D'Arcy and Olivia Cooke are playing the adult versions of the characters in the show.

This indicates that the show may have flashbacks, or will start in an earlier time period before moving to the "present day" of the story, during the build-up to the civil war known as the Dance of the Dragons, when two branches of House Targaryen, both equipped with dragons, clash over the Iron Throne.

Filming of the series is continuing at the Warner Brothers Studios in Leavesden, near London. Recently, a large, red castle facade was seen being built, possibly to stand in for the Red Keep of King's Landing. The show has completed location filming in Cornwall and will move to location filming in Spain and Portugal in the near future. Production is expected to run into the autumn, ahead of a possible spring 2022 debut.

TIE FIGHTER gets a stunning fan-made remake

The iconic 1994 video game TIE Fighter has gotten a comprehensive remake from fans.

TIE Fighter: Total Conversion is a mod for X-Wing Alliance, the 1999 semi-sequel to TIE Fighter featuring a much better engine. The mod is a spinoff of the X-Wing Alliance Upgrade mod, which replaces all of the game's models and textures with much more modern equivalents whilst retaining the classic gameplay.

The game revamps all 13 campaigns from the original game and its two expansions, for a total of 104 missions. The game also features 41 "reimagined" missions, with many more ships (including the Super Star Destroyer Executor in some cases) added to the original missions to dramatically increase the size and scope of the battles. The mod also, impressively, supports VR.

To play the game, you'll need a copy of X-Wing: Alliance from GoG, a download and install of the X-Wing Alliance Upgrade mod, and a download and install of the TIE Fighter: Total Conversion mod, all of which are fairly self-explanatory.

RIP Richard Donner

The news has broken that director Richard Donner - who created the first superhero mega-blockbuster with Superman, setting the scene for all that followed - has passed away at the age of 91.

Donner, a native of the Bronx in New York City, started his career in television as an actor. However, he decided his skills lay more behind the camera and became first an assistant director and then a full director of commercials and television, starting out in westerns such as Wanted: Dead or Alive and The Rifleman. In the 1960s he became a prolific TV director for shows like Get Smart, The Fugitive and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Arguably his best-known work in this time period was Nightmare at 20,000 Feet, an episode of The Twilight Zone starring William Shatner and which showcased his talent for building suspense on a tight budget.

He directed his first feature, X-15, in 1961 but his TV work kept him busy, and he only directed two more films that decade, Salt and Pepper (1968) and Lola (1969). His fourth film, the horror thriller The Omen (1976), was a surprise smash hit and made his name. Whilst debating what project to tackle next, he was contacted by Ilya and Alexander Salkind, who had bought the film rights to DC Comics' Superman character in 1973. They had developed an epic story spanning two movies and been through a long list of directors, including George Lucas, who had passed to make Star Wars, and Steven Spielberg, who was already committed to Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Donner had been committed to making The Omen II, but the Salkinds changed his mind by offering him $1 million. The Salkinds delivered the script for the two movies, totalling 550 pages, which Donner considered to be more than twice as long as was feasible to fit into two two-hour films. A hasty rewrite cut the script down to something sane.

Donner spent eighteen months shooting Superman and about three-quarters of Superman II; budget concerns led the team to halting work on the second film and focusing on the first movie, which was released to critical acclaim and massive commercial success in 1978. Donner had a falling-out with the Salkinds during the publicity tour for the film and they decided not to invite him back for Superman II and instead asked producer Richard Lester to complete the film. Lester did so, offering Donner a co-director's credit which Donner angrily refused. The move was highly controversial, with multiple actors expressing anger over the situation (Donner had been a highly popular presence on set) and multiple crewmembers declining to return, either out of loyalty to Donner or because they found Lester impossible to work with (including mild-mannered composer John Williams).

Despite the controversy, Superman II was released to critical acclaim in 1980. In 2006, as part of the publicity drive for Bryan Singer's Superman Returns, Donner finally completed his Director's Cut of the film, using material moved into the first Superman film during production as well as material that had never seen the light of day before, as well as unused footage from the first film.

Donner's career initially appeared damaged by the controversy, as his next films Inside Moves (1980) and The Toy (1982) did not do well. However, he returned to prominence with a Steven Spielberg collaboration which became a huge cult hit, The Goonies (1985), and the cult fantasy film Ladyhawke (1985). His next monster smash hit was Lethal Weapon (1987). He returned for the sequels Lethal Weapon 2 (1989), 3 (1992) and 4 (1998). He also enjoyed success with Scrooged (1988) and Maverick (1994). He also served as a producer on Bryan Singer's X-Men (2000). His last film before retirement was the Bruce Willis action thriller 16 Blocks (2006).

Richard Donner was an old-school Hollywood director who managed the difficult transition to the behemothic blockbusters of the 1980s and 1990s. He enjoyed a lengthy career in television and film, working alongside many of Hollywood's greatest actors. Widely-praised by his acting colleagues for his integrity and affability on set, as well as his refusal to take nonsense from studio bureaucrats, he had an eye for detail, character, atmosphere and action, and was as adept at suspenseful horror as he was wide-scale action and character comedy. To this day, he can be said to have directed the two finest Superman movies ever made (despite the attempts of others). He will certainly be missed.

Star Trek: Nemesis

A coup has taken place on the Romulan homeworld, with the new ruler emerging from the ranks of the Reman underclass, a secondary race treated almost as slaves by the Romulans themselves. This curious chain of events attracts the attention of Captain Jean-Luc Picard, who is dispatched by the Federation to respond to a peace initiative by the Reman leader, Shinzon. However, Shinzon has lured Picard into a trap for his own purposes.

Released in 2002, Nemesis was the tenth feature film in the Star Trek franchise and the fourth to feature the crew from Star Trek: The Next Generation. In some respects it should have been a big hit: it had a new creative team, with hot writer-of-the-moment John Logan penning a script to be directed by the promising Stuart Baird. Paramount hoped to replicate the creative refresh that took place before Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, which also tapped franchise newcomers (writer-producer Harve Bennett and director Nicholas Meyer in that case) to reinvigorate the series.

This move proved to be less successful when it comes to Nemesis. The film doesn't quite deserve the near-ludicrous critical kicking it's taken in the almost twenty years since release, though it is still a bitty and poorly-conceived movie that can't quite work out what it wants to be.

At its heart, the film seems to be trying to be a two-handed face-off between Patrick Stewart's Picard and Tom Hardy's Shinzon, who (spoiler alert!) turns out to be a clone of Picard. How the Romulans acquired Picard's DNA is never established. Hardy is, of course, now one of the biggest stars in the world thanks to multiple strong roles in numerous films and TV shows, but he was a virtual unknown when he made Nemesis and is a less confident performer, without the presence and gravitas required to go toe-to-toe with Stewart. However, he is not helped by the script, which even acknowledges that Shinzon taking so much time out from his plans to taunt Picard is ridiculous. His plans also seem somewhat vague, with it being unclear why he wants to attack Earth and how he was able to build such a huge, super-warship so easily.

The film also suffers from stodgy pacing. The film has - at least on paper - a reasonable build-up, with the discovery of the B4 android giving way to the political story with the Romulans, and a climactic, major space battle where the Enterprise-E shows what it can do in a fight. However, the middle of the film feels missing. Character-building scenes (including a subplot expanding on Troi's telepathic assault by Shinzon) were left on the cutting room floor in favour of dull set pieces like Picard running around on Shinzon's ship for no apparent reason. It's also less than clear why the vast and somewhat bigoted Romulan Empire, with a huge military and many worlds under its control, has allowed a human clone to take it over as a ruler.

All of that said, the film has some redeeming features. The early set-piece with Picard and Data getting into hijinks on a speedy buggy is random, but fun. Brent Spiner gives a good performance both as Data and the B4 android, and Patrick Stewart is also, as usual, outstanding. Marina Sirtis has a bit more to do as Counsellor Troi (who has not been well-served by these films so far), although again Gates McFadden might as well have not bothered showing up. There's some humorous exchanges that work well and Hardy, though inexperienced, gives a reasonably a promising performance. An unrecognisable Ron Perlman is also typically menacing as the Reman Viceroy, and it's good to finally see Jonathan Frakes' Commander Riker get his very long-delayed promotion to captain. The visual effects are pretty good and it's refreshing to see the Enterprise-E fighting an cloaked ship with more intelligent tactics (including just blanketing the area with phase fire to see where the cloaked ship is). There's also some great set pieces during the battles, such as the ramming scene.

Although these positive moments are welcome, they can't make up for the stodgy pacing, the floundering middle act and the pointlessness (admittedly more obvious in hindsight) of the B4 storyline. Nemesis had a hard time anyway, going up against The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets at the box office and with a four-year gap since the previous, underwhelming film in the franchise (not to mention Star Trek franchise fatigue, which was also impacting the Enterprise TV series), but these problems pretty much sank the film franchise until JJ Abrams came to the rescue seven years later.

Star Trek: Nemesis (**½) has some solid character beats and action scenes, but the film feels thematically and structurally unsound, with a villain who doesn't quite work and some really poor pacing. An underwhelming and forgettable entry to the franchise, and a disappointing bow-out for most of the TNG castmembers.

Noah Hawley confirms his ALIENS TV series will bring the xenomorph to Earth

Noah Hawley, the much-feted writer of Fargo and Legion, is working on an Aliens TV series for FX as his next project.

The writer had been working on a Star Trek movie for Paramount, but apparently Paramount shelved his idea because it had been revolving around new characters rather than established players. Shrugging, Hawley has swapped one classic SF universe for another, even finding time to pen a novel (Anthem, due in January 2022) inbetween.

He has confirmed that his Aliens project will bring the xenomorphs to Earth for the first time in the main series (they did appear on Earth in the non-canon, Aliens vs. Predator splinter timeline, and in comics and novels) and apparently the Weyland-Yutani Company is finally going to reap what it sows when the xenos run amok in their white collar heartland.

Hawley has confirmed that series regular Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) will not appear, saying he feels her story is complete, and the series will rely on brand new characters. He also confirmed that he wants to make a fifth and final season of Fargo that ties the whole series together and gives it a definitive conclusion, but that's a bit further off at the moment.

The Aliens TV series is currently planned to go into production in early 2022, probably to debut on screen in 2023.

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.