Far Cry New Dawn Review: Redundant Proof That Far Cry Needs a Mutation

The game has even less to say about religious cults, belief systems, and American politics than its predecessor.

Far Cry New Dawn
Photo: Ubisoft

Seventeen years after the events depicted in Far Cry 5, Joseph Seed’s doomsday cult—or, at least, what remains of it—and the other survivors of the nuclear holocaust attempt to rebuild the fictional Hope Country, Montana, but their best efforts are threatened at almost every turn by the Highwaymen, a band of roving scavengers with nationwide reach. This is the narrative backdrop of Far Cry New Dawn, which has even less to say about religious cults, belief systems, and American politics than its predecessor. Just about the only thing the game is successful at is confirming that franchise fatigue is real.

If New Dawn is as mute and monotonous about the issues that led to the nuclear war and the philosophies that shape its vision of America, that’s because it’s only interested in serving up a gamified version of survival, logic be damned. How strange, for one, that your makeshift community of Prosperity is described as being in dire straits, yet it seems to have an unending supply of food, water, and medicine. And while the Highwaymen are described as an existential threat to Prosperity, your homestead only ever gets attacked a single time, no matter how many enemies you kill. Most of the time, the game doesn’t take its survival-based points too seriously: At one point, it stresses how important it is that you recruit specialists, yet it reduces your interactions with each one to a single mission.

This shallowness isn’t new to the world of Far Cry, which has been recycling the same tried-and-true gameplay loops for years now. But New Dawn does a particularly poor job of masking the series’s all-too-familiar outpost looting, animal hunting, and map-exploring elements. (Previous spin-offs succeeded at that by bringing a stylistic brio to their unique settings; think of the exaggerated, B-movie camp of Blood Dragon.) The game takes place in a reskinned (and smaller) version of Hope County that’s still populated by many of the same people, but it doesn’t really care to deal with what it would be like to live through nuclear devastation. New Dawn presents a world that behaves pretty much as it did in Far Cry 5, and perversely turns the very idea of recycling concepts into the lynchpin of its narrative.

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Though the majority of New Dawn’s map is open from the get-go, missions are firmly gated by the grade of your weapons. Attack a Tier II foe with a Tier I gun and you’re in for a long haul. To improve your gear, you must expend ethanol, the game’s one arbitrarily limited resource, and the most reliable way to earn it is by scavenging a liberated outpost. This mechanic essentially resets a completed mission to a hostile state, allowing you to beat it (and scavenge it) once more. This wouldn’t be so frustrating if these replays introduced new hazards or forced players to use different strategies—a suppressed sniper rifle is all you need, because the enemy AI can’t adapt to it—but instead they just add more (and higher-tier) enemies. Which is to say, you’re grinding so that you can essentially grind even more.

Expeditions, a new feature here, offer a bit more randomization and are well-suited for short co-op distractions, but these seven small maps also only escalate in difficulty, not in structure. (Never mind that the game never explains logistically how a fuel-starved community can afford to travel to Alcatraz or Louisiana.) All of this repetition makes the grind of New Dawn more obvious—and insulting, considering that Ubisoft allows players who’re willing to spend real-world money to get the resources they’d otherwise have to collect from expeditions or banal hunting activities. At any rate, the only way to craft the highest-tier weapons, crucial for beating the final bosses, is to salvage ethanol from the repeatable outposts.

New Dawn isn’t without its charms. The garish pink mutations of the flora and some fauna and the punk graffiti-chic of the BMX-clad Highwaymen make for a fun reskin of Hope County. The flooding and destruction of certain structures that appeared in Far Cry 5, like John Seed’s underground bunker, often creates environmental puzzles that force players to rethink their exploration. There’s even a late-game twist that imbues your silent protagonist with some additional, eccentric powers. But these elements are layered on top of a checklist of clichés from the series: from larger-than-life sadistic villains—this time the despotic twins Mickey and Lou—to some sort of hallucinogenic trip. Far Cry 5’s version of America may have been shaken up by nuclear bombs, but for New Dawn, it’s business as usual.

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By the time New Dawn reaches its rushed third act, it’s broken down entirely. After failing to convey what it might be like to live through nuclear war, the game simply begins to emulate what films like Mad Max have already depicted about the end of days. The last few levels forgo the open-world features and varied weaponry that make the Far Cry games worth playing for and instead make their way down a post-apocalyptic checklist: a Thunderdome-like fight club, a demolition derby, and even a prison break. New Dawn is too self-aware by half—especially when it comes to side quests, all of which are played for laughs—and spends too much time recycling concepts from other media as opposed to contributing anything new to either the open-world explorer genre or the more niche genre of post-apocalyptic video games.

This game was reviewed using a download code provided by Ubisoft.

Score: 
 Developer: Ubisoft  Publisher: Ubisoft  Platform: PlayStation 4  Release Date: February 15, 2019  ESRB: M  ESRB Descriptions: Blood, Intense Violence, Mild Sexual Themes, Strong Language, Use of Alcohol  Buy: Game

Aaron Riccio

Aaron has been playing games since the late ’80s and writing about them since the early ’00s. He also obsessively writes about crossword clues at The Crossword Scholar.

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