Far Cry New Dawn

The thought process that went into new dawn. Revisiting all the places you have memories and emotion with. Old friends and comrades. Perfect post apocalyptic game play. The colors even really spoke to me. Real, pinks , blues and purples. I mean the game was absolutely, phenomenally done. Way worth the money. Story line was great. Good job as always ladies n gentlemen.

Are show playing catch (i believe this is correct) with a glass basketball until one of them would admit she was too tired to go on. Waiting outside a door, l8ter in the game, a woman waits at a closed door holding an iron sphere. When the two groups joind up l8ter, the gal with the iron sphere would not play catch with the glass basketball because she didn't want to toich it.

Far Cry: New Dawn is one of the most disappointing gamin experiences I've had in a while. I was one of a seeming minority who adored Far Cry 5 - in fact, it's my favorite game in the series. It was therefore with great excitement that I gave FCND a spin. It let me down in almost every way possible.

First of all, the map size. It's about one third the size of FC5 so right off the bat you're getting a much, much smaller game world than the mainline title. Much of the map is undeveloped and cordoned off with the invisible wall of "you can't go that way, you'll die of radiation". The fun of revisiting memorable landmarks and areas of FC5 is minimized as a result. While FC5 veterans will come across some locations that will fill one with nostalgia, and some spots are reused in interesting and fun ways, most of the map is just roads, fields and mountains covered in garish neon pink flowers. My guess is that they went this way to harken back to the retro pink and blue 80s look of their previous, much more beloved "Blood Dragon" expansion. It may have worked there, but in this game it just makes most of the landscape repetitive. Given that the game doesn't have anywhere near the level of big missions and side quests, these factors all combine to make for a pretty empty gamescape.

The two big features of the game - "RPG mechanics" and "base building" - are a complete miss as well. I was excited for the alleged new RPG elements, hoping to craft my character into something unique or do things in my first playthrough that would turn out altogether different in subsequent playthroughs. In reality the RPG thing just boils down to an artificial difficulty gimmick. You don't really do much that alters your character or their "path", you simply upgrade your equipment. This wouldn't by itself be terrible if that's all it was (and if the developers hadn't made it seem like this was a deeper feature) - but, in execution, it makes the game immensely more frustrating. You don't just "get" to upgrade your equipment, you MUST upgrade your equipment. As in, it's literally mandatory. If you play through the game without bothering to do so you'll quickly discover that enemies are relentless bullet sponges. I tried to take on the final missions without grinding to get to the next weapon level but it was no use. I spent literally ten minutes shooting, shooting, shooting, and shooting some more. The (already very frustrating) semi-final battle just kept going because the opposition kept healing before I could do enough damage to win. I had to back out of the conflict and go back to doing other things to unlock the next level of shotgun or whatever in order for it to reach the digits necessary to overcome the enemies' health bar replenishment. This feature is literally nothing more than an artificial gameplay extender, a way to keep the player from progressing "too fast" until they've checked the boxes necessary to be granted enough strength to beat more difficult opponents. In a series famous for allowing players the freedom to approach missions in various ways, to use stealth or firepower, to come into fights from different angles or using different means of attack, why did they think it was a good idea to lock weapons behind classes and demand that the player first unlock those classes in order to progress? Some players seem to have appreciated this element of the game. Some hated it. I am firmly in the latter camp.

The last new feature of note is the game's alleged base-building feature. Perhaps I was foolish to assume that I would - like the RPG mechanic - be playing the game in such a way that I would have some kind of input into growth and development. I liked the idea of gathering a population of characters to inhabit a cobbled-together homestead filled with refugees who would stand up and fight against the bad guys. It didn't really work that way. Instead it was the same gated content as the weapon upgrade stuff. You get the base fairly early - no input as to when, where or how - once you get to the designated part of the story, you're just sent there - and are shown multiple missing crafting or supply stations. You don't really develop or build anything, rather you go and kill enemies, loot crates and take over enemy bases to earn enough materials to unlock them. It's just a sheer, arbitrary game of getting a certain number of inventory maguffins then going back to the base and picking the crafting station that you want to invest the maguffins in. Once you do so, the crafting area appears and in order to uprgrade it to do more useful things (such as producing X type of ammunition) you go back and do the same thing to collect even more inventory maguffins. Rinse, repeat. You're not really building up a base, you're given a base with a bunch of missing things and going through a bunch of grinding to get enough pieces to make those pieces exist. It quickly becomes tiresome and doesn't feel especially immersive.

The last thing I'll talk about is the story, which like most of the rest of the game is pretty surface-level and unsatisfying. The bad guys (in this case bad girls) are totally forgettable. They have enough charisma I guess, though not nearly as much so as Vaas nor as potentially insane as the Seed family. Instead you just have a couple of generic thug bullies who like to threaten people and sass off. Their motivation is little more than greed. The world went to hell, so they took advantage and created the most effective band of looters. That's really about it. There are a couple of points in the game where the story pauses to show flashbacks which are meant to give some kind of humanity and sympathy to these characters but their in-game behavior is so plainly "bad for bad's sake" that it really doesn't gel. I think you're supposed to feel some sort of conflict for trying to take them down but, again, this just came off as too half-baked to be effective. Without spoiling anything I'll say that there's another threat beyond the twins but it was so ridiculous, hastily introduced and thinly developed it wound up feeling like unfinished content that was hurried into this expansion before release. Similarly there are a few returning characters from the first game but most of them are disappointments, wasted opportunities or, again, just rushed. One beloved character makes a return only to say little more than "hey I'm back, thanks for saving that person I care about", before walking off to become just another NPC in your base with a handful or repetitive lines.

In short, everything about this expansion came across to me as empty and half-baked. Some of the ideas might seem alright on paper but the execution left a LOT to be desired. The RPG system is just a mandatory grind loop which forces you to do X amount of Y until you get enough blah to upgrade your guns, and until you, certain enemies are literally unkillable. The base building system is nothing more than a fetch quest cycle in which you fight X amount of enemies and take down Y amount of bases to accumulate enough blah to unlock various mundane functions like ammo or health item benches. The map is literally one third the size of the game that preceded it, and far more empty. The characters are underdeveloped and one-dimensional. The ending is forgettable. The enemy bases are largely repetitive and (as with the rest of the game) not even worth doing until you've reached the required level.

Honestly, I feel that pretty much every single element of this game was a mistake. Very little of it comes across as well-implemented or satisfying. The best new feature is the small handful of "away missions" where you hop in your base's helicopter to launch enemy base raids in areas that are in their own apparent worldspace completely disconnected from anything else in the game, and even these feel like little more than unfinished content that was hurriedly wedged into an "expansion" that, in reality, feels little more than a glorified (and overpriced) DLC pack. I'm glad that there are those out there who find this game to be more fun than Far Cry 5, but with infinitely less content, poorly-developed characters, mandatory grinding, and "features" locked behind mandatory caps, I honestly don't understand them.

Like all Far Cry games, it's a bunch of fun. It re-uses a lot of elements from previous far cry games, especially Far Cry 5 seen as it is somewhat of an expansion, however it does introduce a handful of fresh elements to the world and it's combat. You can now pick up and throw shields, go on fun expeditions to different locations with your friends and explore a colourful and interesting open word that's amazing to look at.

However the ridiculously unrealistic bullet-sponge enemies, uninteresting story, bad villains and repetitive missions drag the game down from a solid experience to the worst instalment in the franchise.

4/10.

I had heard pretty bad things about the game but I still decided to buy it. At first I was pretty disappointed but the game does really get better. I really liked the later half of the game. The story is pretty damn good. I still think Far Cry 5 is better but not by much.