Game review: Far Cry New Dawn takes you to the apocalypse
Far Cry New Dawn is the newest game from Ubisoft's popular open world FPS franchise. This time, players are fighting for their lives in a post apocalyptic world.
At the end of Far Cry 5, the apocalypse happened thanks to many nuclear missiles that hit the Earth and devastated the world. Only a few survivors are left alive, and the world is much different now than it was several years ago.
Far Cry New Dawn serves as a direct sequel to Far Cry 5 set 17 years after the apocalypse. Some humans have found sanctuary building up a nice settlement for themselves called 'Prosperity'.
Things are going well until a pair of sisters named Mickey and Lou come with their soldiers called 'The Highwaymen' to attack the citizens of Prosperity to steal their food and supplies. Montana is no longer a safe place to live thanks to The Highwaymen invading everyone's space.
Although the main story involving the villainous twins is fine, the majority of the time the plot isn't anything special. This is all thanks to your main character having no name or voice as they're just referred to in the game as 'The Captain'.
I think the story would have been much better if the main character had a proper backstory and an actual personality. It's hard to feel sympathy for a character with no name, voice or any distinguished features whatsoever.
It does not help that none of the good guy characters are likable or memorable either. My favourite side character ended up being a dog that I saved that was locked up by The Highwaymen.
There are actually up to eight different side characters that you can recruit in Far Cry New Dawn and all of them have their own special strengths and weaknesses. Sadly though, only one character and join you at one time so you cannot have an army of allies facing the bad guys all of the time.
That being said, I did not find many of the buddy characters to be all that useful at all. They are effective in combat sometimes, although many times they will die and you will have to revive them.
Even though this game is set in a post apocalyptic world, Earth itself isn't as barren and ugly like it is in other video games based on a dystopian future. Far Cry New Dawn's Earth looks bright and pretty thanks to a lot of pink flowers and other vegetation blooming all over the place.
The game is probably one of the prettiest I've played recently as I enjoyed the graphics in Far Cry New Dawn compared to last year's Far Cry 5. Not to mention the game looks even better in 4K since I reviewed/played this game on an Xbox One X console.
While the graphics in Far Cry New Dawn are very impressive, the same cannot be said about the title's overall gameplay experience. While there's nothing really bad about the gameplay, it just feels like Ubisoft is copy and pasting its open world formula to multiple video games.
If you've played Ubisoft's previous open world games like Far Cry 5, Assassin's Creed Odysseyor Ghost Recon Wildlands, you're in for a similar experience if you choose to play Far Cry New Dawn.
Far Cry New Dawn follows the same formula of you being stuck inside a huge open world doing lots and lots of repetitive quests for many lazy NPC characters. Everything is also spread apart so far apart that you often need to find a vehicle in order to get across from one side of the map to another.
The main story of Far Cry New Dawn isn't even that long, but you will get hours of extra play time if you tackle all of the laundry list of side quests that you can do. Some of the side quests can get tiresome though because you have to do the same tasks over and over again like liberating outposts, finding treasure and things like that.
Another thing I did not like about Far Cry New Dawn is its introduction of adding more RPG elements to the FPS genre. I found it annoying that you have to unlock perks before you can do simple skills and every enemy has their own life bar!
The fact that every enemy has a life bar means combat gets unnecessarily long and tiresome if you go up against an army of bad guys. You can no longer kill enemies with one bullet anymore unless you are able to level up quickly enough to make yourself stronger.
Overall, Far Cry New Dawn is an adequate experience that does not really add anything new to the open world FPS genre. While the graphics are excellent to look at, the overall gameplay experience is just average since there's nothing innovative about it. However, it's still a fine game to play if you love the previous Far Cry video games.
Verdict: 7.0/10
