Strangely enough, this game made me realise that the other games in the series were actually better than I'd given them credit for. That's not to say that this entry is bad per se, but it switched things up just enough to make me realise just how much I prefer the way they were before.

For whatever reason, throughout the entire game the weapons felt weak. Even during the tutorial it was taking more shots to put enemies down than it felt like it should've been. Furthermore the lack of marking just makes everything a lot harder than it was probably meant to. In fact a lot of the combat just didn't really feel good at all.

I acknowledge that I played this game "wrong" so I'll make that clear here, this title is very much an attempt at a Far Cry RPG, with the weapons having levels and such with damage that scales accordingly. So by beelining the plot and only doing enough outposts to upgrade my homebase to the required level, I wasn't exactly kitted out by the endgame.

The problem is, through some miracle, neither were my enemies? The penultimate mission sees you fighting the main antagonists - The Twins - and using Level 3 weapons (only 1 shy of the max) it took me an absurd amount of time to kill each of them. Headshots dealing 300 damage and I swear it felt like that had 50,000hp each or something. Not to mention the steady flow of dogs that just appear out of nowhere, grabbing your arm before I could hear them even playing with headphones. But when I finally did kill one and take her weapons, they were level 1? Despite killing me in 4 hits? Bruh

My partner says she had no trouble with this fight at all and that they even went down quickly so this seems to have been my own problem, but idk, I was playing it like a Far Cry game, not like an RPG. Foolish? Maybe. But it hadn't really been an issue until this fight, and it wasn't one for the finale boss either.

That aside, the AI was pretty annoying and this is a really weird thing to mention but the subtitles are so awful. They're not structured at all so any breaks between words or sentences aren't represented. To use an example that hopefully translates well, rather than:
"I'm not trapped in here with you...
You're trapped in here with me" displayed as 2 lines, synced up to the dialogue to show the pause in between them, this game would subtitle it more like:
"I'm not trapped in here with
you. You're trapped in here with me"
and the second line probably wouldn't even show until they were saying the word 'trapped' like bruh

Anyway, besides nitpicking and my own errors the game is alright. I really like the premise of showing Hope County years after the events of 5 but personally for me they changed too much for me to enjoy it nearly as much as I did its predecessor. The twins are fairly interesting and the music/aesthestic is cool, I just couldn't really get into it unfortunately.

Hey you, did you like Far Cry 5? Imagine that but grindy, also with a god awful story. Also with way worse gameplay cuz it's all level based so y'know...get ready to use 500 bullets to kill one dude that's a higher level. WOOO.

New Dawn is def the worst FC game, the game is only fun when you're doing outposts and you got the best guns, which will prb happen about 7 hours into the game. And even then there's only like 10 outposts that you gotta do 3 times each because ofc.

I played it coop and it was pretty boring, HOW DO YOU MAKE FAR CRY COOP BORING? HOW?!

Well by making the game feel really soulless and rushed.

The game is really buggy, which would be a negative in a better game but here the bugs were the funniest parts of the game so oh well. One time my character started the swimming animation mid air for some reason and I was stuck in the air and it looked like I was swimming, it was weird but me and my friend couldn't stop laughing about it. Another time a wolf just started running in a circle around me which was hilarious.

FC New Dawn feels really pointless as a game, after the ending of FC5, making another game where it's revealed that practically most if not all of the characters somehow survived and are ok feels...unnecessary and makes the ending less effective.

There's plenty of times where you could have killed the main villains (which for far cry standards are abysmal btw) and yet you didn't cuz...reasons?

Fr there's a part where they ask you to put your guns in a stash and come in and handcuff yourself or they'll kill some dude (spoiler alert, they still shoot the guy so whatever) and...ok what possible consequence would it have if the character went mhm...nah fuck that and went in and started shooting both of them. It's so fucking stupid.

The way you just kinda stand and stare at characters as they die at the end is really fucking awkward too...

Idk what else to say, if you liked 5 or 4 or 3 or primal or 2 or 1...you prb won't like this one lol. And if you didn't like those either than you still won't like this one lol.

Não tem muito oque falar, usa a mesma fórmula de mundo do far cry 3 e vem sendo aprimorada jogo após jogo mas sempre sem grandes mudanças!

É meio obrigatório jogar esse se gosta muito do Far Cry 5

Me divertiu, é industrializado, é esquecível como um sessão da tarde

Nota 6

Bad gameplay, just like farcry 5.
Looks like a farcry 5 dlc, but extremely expensive.
Ruins the god tier story from farcry 5, with a joseph nothing like the original joseph.
AND, it has lots of paid microtransactions.
This game sucks.

The Far Cry formula has gotten so rote by now that I just couldn't get into this game. The wacko nemesis, the cookie cutter weapons, the faceless goons, the endless quests, the meaningless story. Now they also gatekeep basic actions behind upgrades (can't use binoculars or carry more than one weapon or have any fun, I guess) and offer to sell you weapons from the crafting table for actual money (meaning they're more incentivised to make crafting a hassle so you'd cough up).

But it was really once I got to the first story mission in the sandbox and was hit by another instance of the quality Ubisoft humour with a guy called Beans trying to put together a collection of maps and such and calling it, get this, Wiki-Beans, that I decided I'm done. Mediocre mechanics can be saved by a great story and vice versa, but with Far Cry it seems everything's mediocre-to-outright-bad now.

Well, fine, the world looks pretty. But I really wish the game allowed me to get more fun abilities straight away (if there even are any). The auto-driving is a really nice addition since it lets me do anything better with my life; too bad the constant enemy patrols keep attacking and forcing another boring empty fight. The weapons are essentially the same you find in most shooters (especially boring after having just played R&C: Rift Apart and Resistance 3) and instead of coming up with more interesting weapons, they just add different levels of quality, like in MMORPGs, so that you start with a shoddy version of the same weapon you'll hopefully one day get in a good version (and you can get there faster if you pay some cold hard cash).

I thought maybe liberating an outpost would be more fun than the boringly scripted story missions, but hiding behind a rock trying to figure out where people are shooting me and then wasting ammo on taking them down because I'm using level 1 weapons quickly convinced me otherwise. The companions seem hardly worth the cost of revival when they keep getting shot down constantly, even on medium difficulty. After a while I just stopped reviving them, considering it a waste of both time and resources. And it's honestly no wonder considering the enemy AI seems advanced enough to only run and gun, often standing still in the middle of a field while shooting at me.

And it just shows how much care Ubisoft put into the gender selection when enemies keep referring to you as "him" in their barks even when you're a woman and other characters refer to you only as Captain or Cap, so that they wouldn't have to code in two names. There are gender-neutral names, you know, right, guys?

It's overall an infuriating game design that has little care for the game it's selling, but more for the product it's shipping. Now, I'm not saying you can't enjoy it, and I'm guilty of enjoying some badly designed and/or un-player-friendly games myself, but I just don't have any more place in my life for the repetitive and empty calories of Far Cry. In time I might come to appreciate it more, but the idea of giving more time to this game threatens to cause an existential crisis. I’d rather try something that remembers to make an effort.

the enjoyable parts of this game are offset by how breathtakingly stupid it is. just such incredible dumb guy energy emanates off this thing like the orb of confusion. you are constantly under attack from dogs and highwaymen, the reload speed is almost comical in how lackadaisical it is and the writing feels like a post-apocalypse story written by a facebook boomer dad. if you ever wanted to shoot up young people with dyed hair who listen to hip hop music and also drive a Ford F-150 and cut me off without signaling, the game for you is finally reality!

The only other Far Cry I’ve played is Blood Dragon, which I think is a perfectly average game, elevated by its character, that look and feel thoroughly reminiscent of an 80s styled neon sci-fi action movie. Now imagine that game, zero advancements made to it mechanically (if anything it’s regressed a tad, with floatier shooting, and far stupider AI), trade that macho 80s vibe and character for something far more generic, now imagine it with these tacked on RPG elements, so enemies, and more frustratingly animals, are spongier and the whole thing is arbitrarily grindier. But also there’s a premium currency shop, so you have the option to pay real money to get all the best shit right away and skip the grind. You also have the option to pay nothing and skip the whole thing. I’m gonna recommend you go with that option.

As somebody who used to be a big Far Cry enjoyer but fell out of the series after FC5, New Dawn reminds me of why enjoyed these games so much, but also showed me that the series really needs a dramatic change.

Obviously New Dawn takes a lot from FC5 and mechanically feels the same, but there's enough changes here that makes me like this more. For instance, the story presentation is much less intrusive than in FC5, which was a big annoyance for me. There's also some interesting live service-esque features, like replayable missions/activities with increasing difficulty, which actually works quite well in practice. Not to mention that the colorful open world area can be quite breathtaking sometimes, I especially enjoy the night time skybox. Also, pretty good photo mode!

But as you might expect from a modern Ubisoft game, the story and writing can be... uninteresting, but its at least inoffensive. The live service stuff also creeps in through the microtransaction features, which is quite annoying to see every time I'm browsing for new vehicles or weapons. I also think that the FC formula is especially showing its age in the main missions, it feels like some of the worst parts of the PS3-360 era shooter craze being brought back to life (and this is coming from somebody who loves that era of games).

New Dawn certainly tries to be fitting to its name, but it's still just another day in the life of a Far Cry game. There's some fun, small changes to the formula but you can't dress up an aging mannequin too much.

I also wrote another "Photo Journal" for this game, it's basically an article filled with screenshots from the game that I took myself, and I try to narrate what's going on in my playthrough and my thoughts of the game using those screenshots as visual aid. If you're curious check it out here.

New Dawn is better than the sum of its parts, but those parts are still pretty bad.

THE GOOD

Mostly retains FarCry 3 gameplay - Capturing outposts above your level is tense and rewarding - Aggressive monetization doesn't impact gameplay too much - You can kick the crap out of Joseph Seed

THE BAD

Bad story, bad characters, bad villains - Horrible modern licensed tracks - No gun customization - Atrocious, though mercifully rare, boss fights - Fun upgrades come too late in the game

/////Spoilers follow/////

The most universally reviled of the FarCry games, it completely recycled the map from the already mediocre FarCry 5 and positioned itself as an absolute GAAS nightmare, introducing the by now Ubi-quitous looter element that has spread from The Division to Assassin's Creed to Ghost Recon and tripling down on the monetization scheme present in 5: where that game only allowed you to purchase premium weapons to bypass the main quest gear gating, this one flat out offers you to buy crafting materials and perk unlocks with real money, directing to the store when you run out.

That all sounds absolutely miserable on paper, and yet New Dawn is surprisingly fair when it comes to rewarding the player with a wealth of all the things it's trying to sell you, simply for engaging in side content that's pretty fun to begin with. The result is that you will never find yourself feeling the necessity to skip ahead in the grind by spending cash, simply because there is no grind. The only thing that matters in the game is the tier of your equipped weapons: if it's the same level as the enemy you are shooting it will deal good damage, if it's lower it will not.

The bulk of your upgrade materials comes from a risk-reward system: instead of featuring the useless option to reset all outposts, the game allows to reset them one by one. Once an outpost is liberated, it can be immediately surrendered back to the enemy and thus liberated again, only with enemies in higher numbers and of higher level. Being too greedy will mean making an outpost temporarily unbeatable if your equipment is inadequate, but successfully doing this will shower you with more upgrade materials you will know what to do with, and it can be done any number of times.

The downside of this is that all outposts will be pathetically easy the first time around, only becoming even remotely challenging on a second or even third pass, a problem further compounded by the fact that if you milk the early (and easier) ones early on, you will have no real need to do so with the later ones, leaving no real incentive to play them twice, or at all, unless seeking to compulsively unlock every gun and max out your upgrade trees. If that describes you then be ready to replay the same outposts and raids over and over again, but if you don't care about completionism you will experience no grind whatsoever.

Tackling outposts two or three levels over yours is a tense affair: you will have to be clever and absolutely avoid detection, or you will be toast. Stalking that last elite enemy, knowing he can quickly throw all your efforts to the wind is nai-biting stuff, and the kind of player involvement you hardly expect from a modern FarCry game.

By the time the story had progressed enough to unlock the third tier of weapons out of four, I was swimming in so many resources that only the top tier components were in need of finding, and ever so briefly at that, since all you have to do is go in an optional raid or two in order to receive everything you need. There are side activities like convoy hijacking, prisoner rescues and treasure hunts that present you with slightly above Bethesda-level puzzles to unlock caches, perk points and materials. It's all fun enough to do that it doesn't feel like a chore. Unfortunately weapon customization is gone entirely, meaning you are stuck with whatever attachments each weapon comes with, in an inexplicable step back. You can customize the looks of your character you can never see though, betraying the coop oriented nature of the game.

The game wastes no time in handing out all of the typical upgrades: wingsuit, grappling hook and the like, which are available immediately in the perks menu. It does however dole out some of the most fun upgrades (double jump, limited invisibility, super armor) when you are one hour from the ending, meaning you will have precious little time to play around with them unless you decide to go do the outposts again.

So the looter element and monetization are really a non-factor, and the gameplay retains the core elements that make the formula work, so then what is the problem? The problem lies in the fact that this is yet another cookie cutter FarCry game made almost entirely of recycled assets, and the story and characters simply cannot cut the mustard when it comes to upholding series standards. Which brings us to the Twins.

As per tradidion of the FarCry franchise ever since the second game gave us the Jackal, the seminal prototype for the charismatic in-your-face villain with a catchphrase, a trend continued with Vaas Montenegro, Pagan Min, Joseph Seed and more recently Giancarlo Esposito as Antón Castillo, New Dawn makes its own attempt by introducing the leaders of a bland gang of bandits (blandits?) whose main distinguishing feature is that they constantly listen to the worst music in the world. They are bossed around by two black girls going on and on about "solving problems like daddy taught us" (read: committing wanton murder), which is their store brand version of "the definition of insanity". They are the worst villains in the FarCry franchise, having nothing more up their pink sleeves than the most stereotypical loudmouth ghetto characterization this side of a minstrel show, no redeeming qualities, no character arc and no worthwhile sendoff.

The game tries its best to throw flashbacks at you to establish these two as victims of a domineering father, with their mother begging the children to not follow in the father's footsteps, but whatever good will that puts on the table is squandered by the rest of their character development, or lack thereof. They never show any kind of moral conflict or have any kind of disagreement with one another (to the point Ubisoft might have saved on voice actors and merged them into one character): all they do is mouth off and kill everything they see, and they still come off as completely unthreatening. As they lay dying after one of the worst boss fights imaginable, the game gives you what it thinks is a big emotional moment which hilariously boils down to "Shiet, I guess we dying huh? Dayum, we fucked up: momma told us no to become like our dad, but we did. We been bad" to which the sister replies "Shiet, but we had so much fun huh?" They laugh it off reminiscing of their murdering and pillaging and they die. That's very nearly a direct quote by the way.

Almost as an apology for presenting you with such useless villains, New Dawn brings back supervillain Joseph Seed and his religious ramblings from the previous game. He also gets what the game thinks is a redemption arc, involving his ambitious son who only comes off as a spoiled brat who wants to eat this apple of eden macguffin but his dad won't let him. The last thing Joseph Seed tells you before you unceremoniously shoot him in the chest is that he has been a bad bad man, and that only after seeing his son die following the worst final boss fight in the world. The game pats itself on the back, even though this only makes the character even more vile, as he only starts caring about what he's done after his son dies.

Hysterically, due to sloppy game design, the game lets you beat the everlasting crap out of Joseph Seed in front of his entire gathering of faithful and sworn bodyguards, who do not react in the slightest: at one specific point he is treated like any friendly NPC and you can punch, kick, shoot, stab him, set him on fire with no repercussion as he runs shrieking for his life in the most comically out of character way possible. He can't be killed, at most going down for you to revive, so you can just go to town to your heart's content, kicking him while he's down. The supervillain from FarCry 5, everyone, reduced to a complete mockery.

The rest of the cast are what you've come to expect from an Ubisoft game at this point: they look like the sort of people you expect to find at a TED-X talk, sporting ridiculous pompadour haircuts and yammering on and on with interminable monologues that the writers thought would be hilarious but can only make you groan. The one time I did laugh was during a completely unscripted moment in which a wolf interrupted an NPC's ramblings to start mauling them on the spot, evidently sick and tired of their unfunny verbal diarrhea. You'll even meet an assortment of characters from FarCry 5, though I dare you to even remember a single one of them, forgettable as they are.

Presentation-wise, the game looks marginally better than the previous one, with less static vegetation giving a bit more life to the world. The soundtrack is a real sticking point, however: as mentioned, the game uses music as a vehicle to characterize the various factions, with the good guys listening to a good selection of hits from the 60s and the bad guys listening to the most obnoxious dubstep and rap music known to man. This music will be blaring nonstop from speakers in their bases, and muting it is very tempting. The first thing I did whenever I approached an enemy location was finding their radio to destroy it with extreme prejudice. What's funny is that this was absolutely deliberate: the audio director evidently went out of their want to pick the most irritatingly noise that can disgrace the human ear to use it as environmental storytelling. Valid, but it's still horrendous music you're subjected to.

All in all, New Dawn is a pointless spinoff, a far cry (heh) from the glory days of Blood Dragon. No real need to play this, but at least it's better than 6.

It is what it is: a half-size, half-baked sequel to Far Cry 5 that improves upon the original in some ways and shites all over it in others.

It was nice to revisit locations and catch up with characters from the previous game but there's really not much of a reason to play this if you didn't have a great time with Far Cry 5.

It's not terrible, but it's not terrific either. A few tidying of loose-ends aside, you don't really need to play this after finishing Far Cry 5 but if you're hungry for more and if you can get this game somewhere cheap, then maybe have a look.

Otherwise, probably best to give this one a miss.