Far Cry New Dawn Review

Playing FC New Dawn felt like it was everything good about FC5 minus all the annoying bloat and it might've been an improvement over the base game. The more it went on, the more it felt dragged out and I wished it would just come to an end. It's a shame since everything up to the "through the wringer" mission was enjoyable.

If you played Far Cry 5, it's the same deal. Main difference now is that everything is much smaller and everything comes at a quicker pace. You have one part of Hope County to explore rather the 3 regions in the base game. Main means of progression now is to upgrade your hub known as "New Prosperity" and do some story missions along the way. Best part is that the villains wanting to get the leg up on the player is no longer here and it doesn't interrupt open world activities like the base game.

You also don't start off with super weak weapons and don't have enough skills then the game throwing the kitchen sink at you like Far Cry 5 which is also a big point to New Dawn's favor.

The Sawblade weapon you get is also fantastic since it's satisfying to get a kill with, can kill multiple enemies at once more so when upgraded, can kill higher level enemies fast and requires some skill to use since it's a projectile weapon.

Rwards come at a much snappier pace. Perk points and upgrading your character is quicker as opposed to getting them on occasion if you chose not to engage with it actively. Finding parts and components never take too long. If you need some to build vehicles, treasure hunts will have you covered to give you metal and spring.

Ethanol which is main currency used to upgrade your base comes by fairly quickly if you do the Outposts. One cool thing about New Dawn is that you can give up your current Outpost and get more ethnanol by completing a more challenging version of the one you just did. Meaning it's always easy to get back the Ethanol you just spent. Due to all of this, upgrading your base stats isn't is nowhere near as tied to the perk system like the base game is. Health, explosives, healing, fast travel, vehicles, is all connected to how much you uprgade New Prosperity. On top of that, you need to upgrade it to unlock story missions and the requirements are never steep or time consuming due to how quickly ethanol can be gained through outposts.

Guns for Hire are never taken away from you during story missions all though I didn't need them as much in this game for not throwing nearly as much at you in the early game like FC5 did.

There is one addition to this game which I strongly dislike is the addition of different levelled weapons. FC is going full looter shooter this time, the main difference is that now there is 4 levels of guns as opposed to 30 different variants of them. This isn't too bad at first but the more you get into the game, the more it rear it's ugly head.

At first all you really need is level 2-3 guns to get by most of the game but towards the end particularly the final missions. The last couple of bosses take so much damage that it felt like you needed to get those "rare" level guns to effectively widdle away at their health. I lowered to easy and there were ammo caches lying around to make this much easier but there is no doubt that I had to get the rare guns to be more effective at taking them down.

Then there was the last 3-4 main missions which all involve gear being taken away or nothing involving straight up shooting or stealth just for it all to end with the main villains escaping from the set plan you and the npc had to kill a bunch of nameless captains I knew nothing about.

The story was also kind of interesting at first with Joseph Seed going through a redemption arc of sorts but the actual main villain is so obvious in how much he hates the former that his character introduction is a long winded rant on how much he hates him. I try to avoid complaining about stories being too "predictable" but that was just making things almost too obvious.

Overall, FC New Dawn had a number of things going for it but it's later missions and sections plus the spongey boss fights makes this hard for me to say it's "head and shoulders" above FC5. With that said, I really wanted to say it was.