Mechanically, Far Cry New Dawn is the same game we’ve been playing since 2012’s Far Cry 3. Underneath the gloss, it is more complicated but one message rings clear: Even in Paradise, there will always be snakes. And you, Player One, will get to kill them in the most spectacular ways imaginable.
Set 17 years after nuclear catastrophe shattered the world, Far Cry New Dawn brings players back to the fictional Hope County, a massive tract of Montana that was also the location for Far Cry 5. That game had wistfully golden fields and sun-drenched forest canopies. New Dawn’s Hope County is a pastel wonderland. It’s mutations, which include bark-skinned bison and a Borealis’d sky, recall works like 2018 science fiction horror film Annihilation. Yet Hope County is far from a hostile hellscape; it is a genuine Eden amid nuclear waste.
Communities there thrived until the arrival of the Highwaymen, Mad Max-esque raiders — led by twin sisters Mickey and Lou — who stomp on whatever idyllism that remains. That’s where the player comes in. Taking control of the security chief of a para-military fixer group lead by the charismatic Thomas Rush, your job is to stymie the Highwaymen and protect one of the last remaining free settlements, Prosperity.
Taken on its own, Far Cry New Dawn is as straightforward a post-apocalyptic tale as can be told. Indeed, it’s a concept as old (and fraught) as communal history itself: Enemies are at the gates. The Highwaymen are the Visigoths attacking Rome. They are the inescapable sin of mankind, made manifest again after the End Times, patrolling conveniently placed outposts for the player to assault.
Because of this, it is tempting to say that New Dawn engages with post-apocalyptic iconography only as a means to facilitate more stabby, shooty video game fun times. That’s certainly true on some level, but as things progress it becomes clear that New Dawn provokes a conversation about its genre, its medium, and conflict itself. These ambitious goals are tackled with the series’ characteristic clumsiness, stopping just shy of satisfactory conclusions in spite of an earnest attempt.
New Dawn’s mechanical framework is the same as it has been since Far Cry 3. This is an open-world first-person shooter with main quests, some side quests and a lot of bases to raid. While there is a string of main story quests to complete, New Dawn focuses on dropping the player into a majestic space and dotting it with an assortment of challenges to complete, stashes to find, and characters to recruit as companions. This space is best explored during the early game, when enemies and creatures can easily dispose of the player, and before they have amassed enough high quality weapons and abilities to trivialize combat.
The first two thirds of New Dawn represent the series’ formula at its most effective. Wandering the map is a mixture of scavenging and combat engagements that feel mysterious and deadly in equal measure. It’s never quite as freewheeling as its closest competitor, Fallout, but there is a clear cadence to the exploration. You will slip through the countryside and dodge Highwaymen patrols until you stumble upon the ruins of a church.
There, you might read a note about a hidden stash in a tomb beneath the ground and solve a puzzle to locate the key. Using what you’ve scavenged there, you might craft a new rifle that allows you to single-handedly topple a Highwaymen camp, securing a cache of ethanol to upgrade your own settlement. This process feels natural, more like an actual progression of events instead of merely ticking off check marks on your map.
When broken down, all that’s happening here is two different activities playing off each other. The first is a return of Far Cry 5’s “prepper stashes”, reimagined as post-apocalyptic scavenging excursions. These special scenarios are dotted liberally throughout Hope County, some offering combat challenges and platforming courses, others leaning towards puzzle solving. On one expedition, you might find yourself disarming a lock in a heavily booby-trapped bunker by tinkering with a collection of animatronic fish.
In another, you will be forced to dispose of a mutated wolverine inside a dilapidated community centre and escape from encroaching flames after your attempts to burn the creature’s nest ignite the entire building. These sequences, nestled off the beaten path but never so secret that a non-player character can’t mark their location conveniently on your map, breathe life into the world and admirably experiment with genre tropes of trash scavengers and old world ruins.
They remain one of the series’ best additions, and feed admirably into Far Cry’s brand of open world combat. As you explore more, you can craft more weapons using the collection of duct tape, components, screws, and other materials you find from these stashes.
As you amass resources, you will slowly start tackling the map’s various outposts and refineries. The goal is simple and remains unchanged after all these years: Kill everyone and take what they had. Whereas games like Far Cry 4 and 5 tied this process into vague political or religious struggles, New Dawn’s rationale is much more immediate. Each enemy base contains a cache of ethanol, a resource that is spent exclusively in upgrading the various features of your home settlement.
If you want to craft higher tier weapons, upgrade your garden, or enable fast travel you will need to upgrade your home, and that means accumulating ethanol. Read cynically, this is a much more self-interested motivation for tackling outposts than other Far Cry games. But divorcing these activities from the series’ ill-defined and mismanaged ideological struggles and framing them solely in terms of resource acquisition is a remarkably good fit for the post-apocalyptic genre. It makes sense for New Dawn’s central mechanical struggle to center upon who actually gets to thrive in Paradise.
[review image=”https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/t_original/abmgt9ayprhfy0cff5ss.jpg” heading=”Far Cry New Dawn” label1=”Back Of the Box Quote” description1=”All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again.” label2=”Type of Game” description2=”End Of The World As We Know It” label3=”Liked” description3=”Colourful visual aesthetic, focused story is a welcome step up from Far Cry 5, treasure hunts are great. ” label4=”Disliked” description4=”I’ve been playing the same game since 2012.” label5=”Developer ” description5=”Ubisoft Montreal” label6=”Platforms” description6=”PS4 (Played), Xbox One, PC” label7=”Played” description7=”Finished on default difficulty in roughly 16 hours.”]
And yet, here is where New Dawn starts to run into a problem. In the act of conquering enemy fortifications the series’ vapid repetitiveness makes itself known. First, comes the ability to replay these challenges for further rewards. These “escalations” allow players to cede the base back to the Highwaymen.
This increases the raw difficulty of the encounter — New Dawn adds an ascending four tiers of difficulty for activities and enemies starting with grey common encounters and ending with golden “legendary” encounters — and allows players to continue the violence. For all of their new difficulty, additional guards, and extra alarms, these challenges never escalate so far that you can’t clear them with some sneaking and a decent quality bow and arrow. That weapon and its continued prominence within the series belies one of Far Cry New Dawn’s most explicit motifs: Cycles and repeated conflict.
The bow was first introduced in Far Cry 3, along with this base-clearing activity. In that time, it has remained one of the most effective tools across games. It is essentially silent and can kill most enemies with a single shot. This is true all the way from modern settings like Far Cry 4 and 5 to the prehistoric times of Far Cry Primal.
It is true here as well, after the end of the world. And that truth reveals the series’ underlying thesis, the dark heart that led Far Cry 5 to end in fire and ash: We are no better now than we were in our most distant past.
The mechanical truth of Far Cry, expressed in countless bases claimed and arrows fired is that humanity will never be free from violence. New Dawn has two responses to this cynical thesis. First, it wants you to enjoy the chaos. If you can’t stop it, you might as well have some goddamn fun. Secondly, it wants to understand why all of this has happened before and why all of it will happen again.
That first impulse is best expressed in New Dawn’s vivid aesthetics. Far from the dark and dingy post-apocalyptic worlds characteristic to the genre, New Dawn’s Hope County is a technicolor wonderland teeming with shades and hues that are both unnatural and astounding. Rivers flow with water the same colour as robin’s eggs, deer antlers feature bizarre shades of pink, the sky shimmers with neon light, and bears’ hearts glow yellow within their chests.
New Dawn retains some of the vague Biblical allusions of Far Cry 5 but weaponises them to greater potential. Hope County’s splendor is miraculous and treated as such. This is an impossible sanctuary, a true Garden of Eden in both lushness and colour palette. This is made all the more apparent if players go on “expeditions” missions that take them them outside Hope County and into the rest of the United States. These areas lack the same energy and brightness of the main map, but the resulting contrast only serves to highlight Hope County’s splendor.
That brightness bleeds into the visual flair of the Highwaymen and their design. Their armour and vehicles are painted and marked with the brightest colours, and they announce their attacks with literal fireworks and coloured smoke. They have an undeniable flair, as both a visual extension of Hope County’s mutated majesty and a hip-hip vanguard of the new world. Unlike Far Cry 5’s Eden’s Gate cult, which held onto pretensions of ideology that the game could never adequately define, the Highwaymen are more understandable: they are here to fight, fuck, and have fun.
The result is both a post-apocalypse that feels distinct and a Far Cry setting that feels much more allegorical. Whereas Far Cry 2 and 4 wanted to touch on socio-political struggles in their respective African and Himalayan facsimiles and Far Cry 5 bumbled about in a muddled American pastoralism, New Dawn leverages its flashy aesthetics into a world that is concerned with broader concepts. It is telling that the series’ most vivid setting and straightforwardly honest villains come after the pretensions of polite society have literally been burned off the face of the earth.
Far Cry 5’s biggest flaw was attempting to appeal to modern day issues without mustering the bravery to actually point fingers. New Dawn opts for something less complex and is stronger for it. The corresponding freedom allows it to be more visually communicative and altogether coherent than its predecessor in both design and aesthetics.
New Dawns’ villains, the twin sisters Mikey and Lou, feel less like actual entities in the way that other series’ villains have. Far Cry 4’s Pagan Min, for all of his problematic foppishness, was a clear agent of monarchy and tradition with a defined backstory and motivation for his selfish impulses.
He was a small man, ruling over a small country, lashing out against a world that had failed to love him. Far Cry 2’s Jackal was an agent of forever war, seeking to fan the flames of conflict so high that they might burn away all facilitators of violence including himself. Mickey and Lou are thankfully not as crass as Far Cry 3’s villain Vaas Montenegro but their motives are often as murky and ill-defined.
Because the Highwaymen are the allegorical snakes in Hope County’s Garden of Eden, the Twins are nothing more than Id and Ego made manifest. When they are on screen, their raw charisma makes up for their lack of complexity but their role in the narrative is largely functional.
As the Twins escalate their efforts against the player and Prosperity, New Dawn finds itself moving along with a much more confident pace than Far Cry 5. Gone are the long wanderings and intermittent monologues of vague ideologues. Instead, the Twins exert a real and constant threat against the player through the sheer power of their will and desires. They want so deeply and feel so convinced in their own strength that they never fade to background like some other series villains.
What they lack in complexity, they make up for in sheer presence. The result is that New Dawn’s narrative maintains momentum, even accounting for the moments it pauses and asks to player to take some time upgrading their base.
One of New Dawn’s chief thematic concerns is parenthood and children. It teems with absent fathers, struggling mothers, and wayward children. From Carmina Rye, your first AI companion and daughter of Far Cry 5’s Nick Rye, to the inexplicable decision to give series comedic relief Hurk Drubman Jr. a child of his own, New Dawn is positively fascinated with the relationship between parents and their offspring, and it is here that we start to understand the Twins more. They take because they can, they kill because they want to, and their development — arrested early due to nuclear fire — has manifested in one prolonged temper tantrum.
Far from blaming the Twins, New Dawn more pointedly blames their father, an unseen individual who responded to the challenges of the new world with violence. In the moments where New Dawn starts to explore generational violence, in the moments where it starts to ask how even after the end of all things, we still have villains like the Twins, New Dawn starts to become something more interesting than expected.
New Dawn’s fascination with father figures means reaching back to address the flaws and shortcomings of its own parent game. It is therefore impossible to talk about New Dawn without talking about Far Cry 5 and its own villain, the David Koresh knock-off Joseph Seed.
As a result, New Dawn is not merely a spin-off sequel but a text which actively complicates a player’s existing relationship with Far Cry 5 and Seed himself. In Far Cry 5, Seed made vague proclamations about politicians and the horrors of moderns news as portents of an end that actually did come.
What made Seed falter as a compelling villain was the game’s inability to make his prophecies bold enough to name the forces of injustice sending the world towards annihilation. Seed’s eschatology was couched in Christian metaphor but lacked a coherency beyond the surface trappings. He resurfaces in New Dawn as a new type of “Father” both in the context of his religion and in a more literal sense. And while New Dawn over-assumes how interested players will be in the fate of Joseph Seed, its decision to connect him into its broader thematics turns Seed into an honest to God character this time around.
In the years following the Collapse, Seed became the leader of a survivalist group called ‘New Eden’, a colony of Luddites disconnected from the rest of Hope County. In an allusion to Far Cry Primal that emphasises New Dawn’s belief that there is nothing new under the sun, New Eden functions more like one of that game’s many pre-history tribes than the cult found in Far Cry 5.
As Joseph is once again thrust into leadership and as he reckons with the fact that he was right in the worst possible way, he also becomes a literal father to a young boy named Ethan. This core relationship complements the relationship between the Twins and their father. In this case, Seed’s continued religiosity and faith forces him to come into conflict with Ethan. It is a much more human story, focused on a much more human and haunted man that the paper thin villain from Far Cry 5.
Seed’s presence also brings a corresponding shift into magical-realism that begins to complicate player’s relationships to the game world and Far Cry 5 itself. This comes most notably during the game’s mid-point where, desperate for allies against the Highwaymen, an alliance is forged with New Eden that ends with Joseph giving the player a piece of fruit from a forbidden tree. It’s eye-rollingly on the nose as visual metaphor, but is also how New Dawn justifies an entire new tier of character perks and abilities.
In a move that caught me off guard, New Dawn starts to more adequately incorporate notions of religion into the fabric of its narrative than Far Cry 5 did. It does this while maintaining levels of ambiguity that mostly feels earned rather than cowardly. Did you truly eat fruit blessed by God or can your new abilities be explained away as mutations? Were Far Cry 5’s Sheriff Whitehorse and his deputies unknowing avatars of the Four Horsemen?
New Dawn never goes so far as to answer these questions, but it is in the posing of these things and their corresponding ambiguity that it begins to open up and explore matters of faith and prophecy with more consideration than its father text.
It’s not perfect — this is still a Far Cry game, after all — but New Dawn’s willingness to play with these ideas is certainly welcome.
The end result is a game that I enjoyed but which also frustrated me greatly. On some levels it is crass and annoying. Far too many of its citizens are prone to stupid dick jokes and its tone can vary wildly from scene to scene. Its raw gameplay is both satisfying but also so remarkably shifted away from the complexities of series critical darling Far Cry 2 that additional veneers of gloss — damage numbers, enemy rarities, and the baffling decision to allow players to purchase crafting materials — make it clear that the series will never reclaim its messier, more interesting ideas.
But if I dig deeper, scratching off the fine varnish of AAA quality and safety, there are pieces of a genuinely interesting game. Whether that is the vivid art direction or a willingness to address its themes with a great degree of awareness than previous titles, New Dawn has instances where everything comes together.
Near the middle of my playthrough, I rescued the foul-mouth buffoon Hurk from the Highwaymen’s clutches. I hate Hurk. I hate his fucking guts. He started a joke character in Far Cry 3’s Monkey Business DLC pack and has been featured in all games since, including a baffling presence as ‘Hurky’ in Far Cry Primal. Nothing he says is funny, every moment with him makes me want to choke on a pretzel. Here he was again, a reminder that the Far Cry that compelled me most—the dark and considered Far Cry 2 — could never return.
Like the old world, it was gone. I could try to cling to it, to cling to a world that was, or I could accept that this was the new status quo. That even as New Dawn sometimes surprised me, it would also have Hurk and everything he represented.
“You look dang familiar,” Hurk said to me the first time I saw him again in New Dawn. “As if we’ve done this before in some endless haunting loop from which neither of us will ever escape.” I see you too, New Dawn.
I thought about shooting him in his stupid face. I thought about how his sudden appearance was undermining all the work New Dawn was doing with its narrative. I thought about how much I wished this game was like Far Cry 2. I thought about how long I’d been caught up in Far Cry’s cyclical violence and formulaic gameplay. Then, I finished the dialog and added Hurk to my roster of companion characters.
There are always snakes in the garden. There will always be a new map of bases to conquer. There will always be another Hurk.
The old world is dead, long live the new world.
Comments
66 responses to “Far Cry New Dawn: The Kotaku Review”
Soooo 7.5/10 then?
Scores are for chumps ;P
Would “four out of five rubber chickens” be a score, or an indicator?
rip gg
Me at the start of Far Cry 5: “Look. Joseph is there in front of us. Kill him.”
Me during Far Cry 5: “Oh for the love of god, can we kill him already? His peons keep kidnapping me.”
Me at the end of Far Cry 5: “Finally, I get to…oh for Pete’s sake…”
Far Cry New Dawn: “Hey, who wants to know what happened to Joseph?”
This is absolutely beautifully written. But good god can I feel the elitism just oozing out.
Yeah fuck textual analysis. Thinking about things is for fancy college boys.
Girls can attend college too you know.
Reeeee!
I’m a fancy literature major university boi.
So you’re projecting, then?
Honestly she’s trying so hard it’s cringey.
This is farcry, storyline is at porn level at she’s pretentiously over analysing it like it’s the Mona Lisa.
It’s nice to read things with a little effort injected. I’d read all of Kotaku’s reviews like this because it’s different and interesting.
Absolutely agree. Just…..remember it’s just Farcry, you know?
Authorial intent isn’t the end of analysis.
Aw man, where’s the fucking spoiler warning?
Far Cry 5 is still new enough that peeps who are still making their way through the rest of the game released last year may not have gotten to it.
Now I know it ends with a fucking nuclear fall out and the introduction of that one lady from Primal’s ancestor (by the looks of it).
FFS, Kotaku. Seriously.
In Kotaku’s defense… A good deal of Ubisoft’s own marketing, videos, etc, for New Dawn spoils the ending of FarCry 5 before anyone else does.
The fact you apparently got this far before having it spoiled is arguably a small miracle.
I was mindful not to ruin it for myself. I never get to FC games at launch. I work, just like everyone else. I just finished RDR2 last night despite owning it since launch, for example.
Because the image looked less contemporary and more sci-fi I (wrongly) assumed it was gonna be like Blood Dragon and unrelated to the main story.
I was wrong, but I can see how I made the mistake. But, the game is still recent enough that it is feasible to expect Kotaku to be mindful of spoilers.
I was honestly in the same boat myself… Was yet to finish 5 and had some of Ubisoft’s own New Dawn marketing just unpack the ending of it without any sort of heads up.
Admittedly, it was pretty annoying.
And to be fair to you, as far as spoilers go this ‘review’ is a joke… It has spoilers galore and zero warning for any of it. The whole article comes off far more as the author showing off their linguistics than it does anything else.
It’s not just farcry 5 ending that’s spoilery, it’s the New Dawn plot elements mentioned in the review that sucks.
You’re reading a review of the sequel and hoping for no spoilers of the original. Riiight.
It’s in the first line. I saw the image, went “Oh cool! It’s nearly time to get FC5!”, had perusal of the first bit of the spiel and then realised what I had just done.
I avoided spoilers to this point, but of COURSE I’m going to want to know about the expansion, especially when it looks like it could be stand alone like the FC3 stuff. That’s what I thought I was going in for.
Kotaku does have spoiler warning tags they coulda used.
I can make some amendments to the opening par to put it after the jump, but it’s also a bit harsh to complain about spoilers for a game you’ve avoided for a full year (in a review of the sequel).
I dunno. If you’ve only seen posters and stuff for it you’d be forgiven for thinking that it’s a spin-off rather than a sequel. And anyway, what harm would a spoiler warning do?
Yeah, I don’t want anything from you with that attitude. These are well established courtesies. Thanks for once again being that kind of editor directly to one of your readers just because you didn’t like the information. Very humble of you, Alex.
I’ve made amendments to the opening par already – not sure if you saw. But there’s no need for that, come on.
Just treat me like you treat everyone else and we’ll stay cool.
We don’t need to revisit the past. As I’ve made clear in the past, I’m invested in the integrity of the site. I’ve been here since before Gawker outed Peter Thiel and after the revenge he extracted upon Gawker media.
I often feel singled out by you, and I’m sure you understand why. But we can get past that if you measure your responses to me a bit more mindfully, ya know?
I’ve re-read over what I posted multiple times to check, and honestly I think you’re reading it in a very heated way. I’m not having a go or anything, it’s more of a “hey, we need to be a little practical here”. I made a change immediately after posting the comment, too, so hopefully you know I’m coming at this in good faith and not in a combative way.
Fairfax purchased the Australian sites way before any of that in 2013 and now it’s a part of nine entertainment co.
As I said, Alex, I feel singled out by you from previous experiences. I’m not one to choose my words more carefully or treat you differently just because you have mod skills and write articles, and I respect your content you create before the person you’ve been to me in the past.
I appreciate that! And I’m not trying to have a go or pick fights and I still think I was being pretty measured – it’s my place to take part in the discussion as much as it is to moderate it, so hopefully people get that (and I do so without being unreasonable). All I can do is continue to be my level-headed self as much as possible going forward, and if I’m not please hold me to that.
Welp, the downvotes have started! Shouldn’t question authority, I guess.
I’ll make myself scarce for a while again. I know where this goes.
Thank for the Downvotes, people. I’m referring to actual things that have happened that SUCKED and shouldn’t have been done. Yes, Alex comes across as level headed and blah blah blah, but he has done shonky shit to me before. No matter how nice he seems as he tries to play it off, he clearly did not, at one stage at least, have the faculties to deal with his authority and went a bit nuts shutting me down at one stage.
It’s great that you guys support him and all, I guess, but it kinda sucks when you KNOW you’ve been treated like shit by someone and then they play it off like they’re Dexter after a kill.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
If it makes you feel any better, I downvoted you for apparently being shocked there were spoilers for the first game in a review of its sequel, rather than anything to with Alex.
for game thats 11 months old at that. complaining about spoilers for FC5 is just being shitty
Comeon SDNB (too lazy to type the full name out. And then went and typed all this. Go figure), thanks for spoiling it for me. I scrolled past they story just to get to the comments, and now you spoil the FC5 ending for me!!!
They have spoiler tags to use for a reason dude!!!one!1
/s
Jokes aside, they’ve put spoiler warnings for the most minor of reveals in the past. It really is a surprise they didn’t put one at the start of this just to cover their arses. Personally I don’t care if a story is spoiled or not (it often gives motivation to move forward to me, just to see it ingame), but yeah, not everyone is like that.
Having said that, the others have a point as well. Even after having the FC5 ending revealed, you kept reading. That’s the only way you would have seen the other spoilers pop up. So theres a level of fault with you as well, even though Kotaku should have put the spoiler banner up in the first place.
Nah, stopped reading at nuclear fall-out.
Criticising this is a thing that is totally okay to do. It’s dis-courteous and has been since
Aeris dies.Heather is a great writer. There is no argument there and I welcome people to try and argue otherwise, but as far as editing goes, this was not a great thing to do. A year is a short period of time in a modern gamer’s life. One gamer can’t complete or play all of 2018’s AAA titles and still have time to finish 2017’s backlog whilst, you know, living life and working for the man. Seems reasonable to me, but hey, maybe I’m the minority.
I’m still trying to find time to start games from 2011…
I skip entire series because of what you say – theres just too much out there to play it all.
Overall though, I’m not disagreeing. The story should have had a spoiler banner. That’s all it needed, and its a surprise it was missed. Moreso given the early lines about the ending of the last one. Which wasn’t released that long ago that everyone will have finished or even started it, as shown in the comments.
But it raises another question. When is it OK to post spoilers? Avengers Endgame hits the cinemas in about 10 weeks. Not everyone will see it the first weekend, but does that mean those that do aren’t allowed to discuss it around the water cooler at work? What about the latest episode of a big show like GoT?
Age old argument between me and a mate. He despised spoilers, and we weren’t allowed to talk about a movie until HE had seen it. Which we generally ignored.
I think this needed the spoiler banner, don’t get me wrong. But another part of me also realises that going into an article talking about a direct sequel is probably going to be mentioning the previous game quite early, and quite specifically. its what? Nearly a year old now? That’s a reasonable enough time to expect the bulk of people interested in this iteration to have finished it.
Wait…
DamnAeris died?
Nice spoilerific review. Any chance of slapping a spoiler warning on this to save other readers this annoyance? A review shouldn’t go into plot twists, that should be for players to discover on their own. Though how the author can see the screen while looking so far down her nose at it will have scientists baffled for generations to come. Come on, Kotaku. I love (most) of your articles, but this is poor form. Lift your game n get one of your more level headed Aussie journos to do your reviews. I want to know about a game’s performance and quality, not it’s ideology or a full story reveal please.
You appear to be reading the wrong website. PC Gamer is over there.
Who ever said I’m a PC user? I dig this site, just when they drop the ball I’ll call em out on it. Why is it wrong to want something I like to better itself?
Maybe because what you appear to like is bland, widely available elsewhere throughout the internet, and fundamentally contradicts with what a lot of other people like about this site.
No, your just being a knob. Plain and simple
Main page preview:
So, the game that I’m currently 3/4 of the way through ends with Seed nuking the planet and I can’t do anything about it? Thanks for the spoilers! I would have hated to have to see the ending of the game for myself or anything!
You may want to avoid the Steam landing page for New Dawn then, and a good deal of Ubisoft’s promotional material.
Haven’t looked at them. Once again, the spoiler was part of the main page preview. I didn’t click through to read the review.
It’s hard for me to think of a reason to get this. I think I hit peak Far Cry with 5 (much later than some I expect!). And I really liked FC Primal – I guess I was hoping for a similar reimagining of the formula … but it seems very much more of the same.
I know it’s the same game again but I love FPS games in a post-apocalyptic world, so I’ll give it a shot. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks but you can make him fall for the old ones.
If those old tricks are still entertaining, why not? At some point everyone is going to sick of the same old tricks, though. I’m all in for this one, but they really do need to bring something new to the table, and soon.
This reminds me, I should play Rage (2011, PS3) before the sequel comes out.
Why was FC2 the ‘critical darling’ of the series? It was one of the most repetitive and frustrating of the entire series, or did everyone just forget the instantly respawning outposts, weapons breaking, and basically repeating the game again?
This one doesn’t look too bad, might pick it up. If you’re looking for deep political commentary from a Far Cry game though you’re in the wrong place.
You forgot mortars that hit you with pinpoint accuracy from 2 miles away and no line of sight to ANY enemies in the games 2nd half
It’s the attention to detail that made Far Cry 2 good imo (respawning checkpoints aside – although that did keep the world dangerous at all times, so not all bad in my book). This vid explains it better than I could.
Crowbcat’s video is fun (knew it would be that before I even click it!) but it misses the point that the gameplay wasn’t great – the first hour or so you play it’s a great game, but the malaria mechanic, checkpoints that respawn as soon as you turn your back, and the constant grind mean it isn’t that fun to play.
Yeah true, it had it’s problems for sure. I probably wouldn’t enjoy it as much if I played it again now, and it was very unforgiving in places. I think I just preferred the focus on the detail of the world rather than the story. FarCry is at it’s best for me when I’m immersed in the sandbox – and as much as the checkpoint thing was annoying at the time, I think I prefer it to the approach now, where you clear an area and then the whole region just isn’t a threat any more and you can tune out while traversing it. Same with the guns, I only changed off the starter gun in 5 because I was bored, there’s really no need to otherwise.
It wasnt, theres just some reporters who THINK it is.
Seriously, people complaining about spoilers? Any sort of statute of limitations for spoilers is moot and gone once a sequel is out. If you care that much, take less time than a year to finish it.
By the way, Vader is Luke’s father and Dumbledore dies.
Interesting article, still really just Far Cry 3 tho so will still pass.
I came into this review expecting spoilers from Far Cry 5, 100%, I’m not that interested in the game and read reviews if I don’t care.
What I was surprised by was no spoiler warning.
Title could of read.
Far Cry New Dawn: The Kotaku Review, (contains spoilers to FC5)
It is a courtesy even for a game that came out 12 me nuts ago.
Only $46 at JB and Harvey Norman today if anyone’s biting. I did.
So, I think Heather completely missed the point with FC4’s antagonist Pagan Min.
The player, Ajay, is travelling to the country where he was born to lay his mother’s ashes to rest. Pagan Min has de facto control of the country. Right at the start, Min appears and takes you hostage, tortures the guy that helped sneak you into the country, offers you some crab rangoon, then goes and takes a phone call. He says, ‘wait right here’. If you do just that, for about 10 minutes, he comes back, takes you straight to your family’s resting place, you place your mother’s ashes, he gives you the country, and fucks off for good. No shots fired, no-one dies – this is the good ending, and it’s what Min wants right from the start – he literally doesn’t want to be running the country any more.If you don’t wait, you escape the castle and then proceed to take control of the country back from Min mostly by murdering your way through the remaining populace. (incidentally you have a choice to help one of two local leaders along the way, neither of which are good – one wants to turn the country into a religious state and kill anyone who doesn’t agree, the other wants to continue the drug trade to make the country stronger at the expense of those who are buying the drugs) So you clear out all the outposts etc etc and when you reach Min he’s just like, ‘what were you doing? I was just going to give you the country but you went around killing everyone wtf’, which at that point sounds more like another ploy to escape his own death…unless you waited through the bit at the start.
The game gives you the option to complete it without killing anyone. It’s subtly asking a question about why we choose to enjoy killing people as a form of entertainment – even when the explicit option to not do so is presented to the player at the start of the game. So Pagan Min’s not the bad guy – the player character is.
This is a mostly great review, as already discussed spoiler tags would be very welcome, particularly as Heather has dropped it mid-paragraph most times!
The review is very rambling at the end, kind of undoes a lot of what was written before it… Far Cry 2? Yeah OK, not exactly relevant.
Hurk really does suck though.
I thought the end of FC5 was a very cool surprise & highlight of the game. The launch trailer for FC :ND clearly paid no respect to those who has not played FC5 yet though.
@vellax that’d be fine, but it stops me from interacting with people about video games on Kotaku. Instead I end up modded. Like this very post will be due to the democracy of our voting system here. For a person like me, whose relationships and friendships have become all about money and business, talking to other people about video games is important. Probably moreso than it has any right to be. But i means a lot to me.
As far as Far Cry 5 goes, whelp, I get limited time to play games. I’ve mentioned this before, but alongside working (currently out schmoozing for work now, and very intoxicated, but having a strategic Zinger burger I pre-stashed in the hotel room before wandering back down) I have carer duties for my very sick wife. Gaming is not something I’ll get to prioritise for myself ever again and so Far Cry 5 (and forgive me for saying this) is a far cry from where I’m at right now. I mean, yeah, I’d like to play the shit out of everything upon launch, but it’s just not something I can make happen. All I wanna do right now is go back to my house and finally have a crack at the Piranha Plant in Smash Bros. How long has that been out for now? I managed to finish RDR2 last night but that took some gymnastics over the past months as it was. I just figured the gaming community at large was a bit more courteous about spoilers because, as some of us mentioned, there are A LOT of games to get through these days.
I still haven’t started an Assassin’s Creed game for example. I own them, just can’t get to ’em.
I literally have this ongoing fantasy throughout each day of buying an island to live on when I’m in my 60’s and becoming a recluse to I can finish the games I worked hard to buy. That is literally the aspiration in life I have at the moment. So yeah, despite the drunken early morning rant, I guess what I’m saying is spoilers are important to avoid for me because they directly affect my me time, and my me time is fragmentary and minimalist as it is.
I always pictured my character taking Hurk out on a mission, listening to him talk for 30 seconds and then mumbling under her breath “We are all going to die”
Actually I thought this review was pretty good. Thorough, interesting and well-written. And due to some of her rants in the past, I haven’t been a fan.
Spoiler alerts probably are sensible generally, as it surely isnt that hard to implement. Although at the same time….this is Far Cry. Complex stories and amazing plot-twists are not the forte of this series.
Kill bad guys, raid forts, collect and craft, climb towers and an occasional cut scene. Repeat ad infinitum.
Whether you personally think the story is good or bad, for anything, is irrelevant to others not wanting it spoiled for them.