Far Cry New Dawn

The replayable Outposts and Expeditions are a blast (even moreso in co-op) and the mild RPG mechanics of base building is a great start, even if it needs to be expanded upon. However, in a larger sense, the adventure is brought down by a comparatively small size and cookie-cutter bad guys. New Dawn isn’t a terrible experience, but it would have been better served by being delivered as DLC material, not passed off as a full game.

I had the most fun in New Dawn during two states: when I was at my most stealthy and, conversely, my most reckless. Those are Far Cry’s sweet spots. Either doing one-click takedowns on enemies you sneak up on, or just turning the entire place into a run-and-gun wonderland of destruction. If you play Far Cry in the middle, then it’s a middling experience. But if you embrace New Dawn’s ridiculousness, there’s a fun, casual level of violence to enjoy.

Far Cry New Dawn while being a great experience feels more like an expansion to Far Cry 5 than it does its own stand alone title. This is not a bad thing, but if it had to be compared? It would be like saying New Dawn is equivalent to The Witcher 3’s Blood & Wine which was a great addition to the main title.

Far Cry New Dawn is an interesting experiment for the franchise. While it borrows some mechanics from the Ubisoft family that feel out of place and suffers from frustrating padding, the core Far Cry experience might be enough to tide you over once it finally gets going.

New Dawn retains all the good elements from Far Cry 5 -like the intense gunplay, the beautiful graphics and the massive open world- and tries to implement new ideas with its "Light RPG" mechanics. And while some of the new ideas really work, you can't help but get the feeling that you've seen and done everything before, but this time you’re doing them in a "post-apocalyptic" world that feels uninspired and bland.

Far Cry New Dawn does try a few news things and it adds a fresh new style to a known world, but it does not really go out of bounds. If you are not done with Far Cry yet, you will enjoy yourself but if you are done, this is just more of the same thing.

Far Cry New Dawn is as good as it is inconsequential. Even though it has the great mechanics that characterizes the franchise, its story, allies and villains are empty throughout the game. So, we get an addictive and fun-to-play title that, at the same time, lacks soul and singularity, looking too much like Far Cry 5.

New Dawn’s post-apocalyptic landscape makes for a more focused version of the Far Cry package, which is great if you just want to kill time capturing outposts and hunting animals.

This new Far Cry shines from its variety of side quests and a setup that gives a fresh taste to the formula. We would have loved a better scenario and a brand new AI system.

Far Cry New Dawn offers a leaner take on Ubisoft’s open world formula clocking in at about 13 hours, but hardcore completionists can stretch beyond that. The characters and narrative drag down the fun, but the variety in your tactics and arsenal allow you to approach each activity in different ways. It doesn’t revolutionize the series, but New Dawn is a solid entry that makes us eager to see where the franchise goes next.

The core formula of this series holds up, but New Dawn struggles to make worthwhile contributions to it. Beyond the expedition missions, little about New Dawn actually feels new, and the only interesting narrative threads are the tie-ins to Far Cry 5. When all the best parts of a new game are the old parts, it’s hard to be excited about what comes next.

Far Cry New Dawn isn't bad by any stretch, and judged on its own it's a pretty good game. Its combat is still satisfying, capturing outposts never ceases to be entertaining, but the issue is that it both isn't different enough from or as good as its predecessor. Far Cry 5 is a better game and New Dawn is too similar to recommend unless you literally just want more of the same, but with less vision.

Far Cry New Dawn suffers from clashing tones and cringey writing, but it offers some unique quests and a fun, chaotic wasteland to play around in.

Although there's fun to be had in New Dawn, it feels a bit like a downgrade compared to Far Cry 5. An okay story, weak antagonists and mostly empty world are being held up by the franchise's usual standard for combat and graphics.

New Hope has changed after the Apocalypse and the new generations are hungry for battles. The core of the fun is the same as always and Ubisoft should have dared a better plot and new mechanics.

Whilst Far Cry New Dawn isn't a completely new Experience, it does have a few features that give it new life, and despite the bugs and weak story, it was nice revisiting Hope County.

Ubisoft has to be careful not to exploit the Far Cry franchise too much. New Dawn is an intermediate Far Cry, which will satisfy the fans waiting for the next major part, but it's nothing exceptional. Nice to play, but clearly not a must-have.

New Dawn is more Far Cry for those who have extinguished all their other options, but its new additions aren't fleshed out quite enough to captivate newcomers looking for a substantial open world experience, or entice deserters that have grown tired of the franchise formula.

Far Cry: New Dawn is a quickly produced FC 5 with a new texture pack and some funky colors. Although the plot does not reach its potential, the game has some really creative missions, the graphics are beautiful, and the music is great. If only the cool shooting mechanic wasn't limited by the new "color system".

Far Cry New Dawn does everything you'd expect from a Far Cry title. However, it failed to deliver the same level of polish and enjoyment its predecessor enjoyed, and while it’s still packed with buckets of fun, I couldn't help shake the feeling that I’ve done all this before.

New Dawn is a clearing of the air after Far Cry 5, but calling it a "new dawn" is preposterous. What we have here is a sideways hop, a purgatory of a sequel in a series that has no idea what to do with itself, beyond giving you another mapful of nodes to flip. [Issue#331, p.116]

Far Cry: New Dawn offers fans of the series much of what they have come to like about it and does some good work as a direct sequel, but its reduced scope has led to some changes that are not for the better, and it definitely stands as a minor entry.

Far Cry New Dawn falls short in many ways, but it still retains the qualities of the formula set by the series with Far Cry 3.

Far Cry: New Dawn can quite easily provide a weekend of fun, but when it comes to recalling your favourite games of 2019, don't expect to remember this post-apocalyptic adventure. Its streamlined RPG elements do add some welcome structure, but this trek through Hope County may seem familiar to a fault. It's almost a shame that Ubisoft didn't go all-in on making New Dawn a totally over-the-top spin-off, rather than a sequel that struggles to tell an all-too-serious story.

It all feels mightily uneven. For every thrilling gunfight or anecdote-worthy encounter in the wilderness are other stories of frustration or key non-player characters wandering away from the objective and getting stuck on a rock. It perhaps betrays the short turnaround since Far Cry 5, with its ideas and changes not given room to flower and make New Dawn the disruptive series experiment it could have been. But if you are willing to look past its niggles and familiarity, New Dawn still provides plenty of post-apocalyptic punch.

A direct-to-video style sequel to Far Cry 5 that’s still perfectly playable but fails to make use of its own premise in any interesting way.

Even if it offers some new ways to play that can make the formula evolve in the right direction, Far Cry: New Dawn suffers from having a poor story and very forgettable characters, that make it look like a Direct-to-DVD sequel to Far Cry 5. The real new dawn for the series is has yet to come.

Far Cry: New Dawn is not a revolution for the series, tweaking the Far Cry formula and hitting it to hard with microtransactions for mixed levels of success with the series' first direct sequel.

Far Cry New Dawn is a standalone sequel to Far Cry 5, but it adds nothing of meaning or value to the original story. If you just want more Far Cry, this is worth checking out. Otherwise, you're not really missing much here.

Fire may have rained from the skies and wiped out entire nations, but the action in Far Cry New Dawn is pretty much the same as it ever was, only less so. A few interesting new tweaks to the series' formula are overshadowed by a cut-rate campaign, a story that gets colossally dumb in the third act, and a resource system that feels both unbalanced and pointless.

Far Cry New Dawn is fine, functional, and sometimes fun, but it mostly just hovers around the middle, neither touching greatness nor mediocrity but occupying the safe, boring plateau in between.

There's a lot of potential in the ideas seeded in New Dawn, but there isn't enough room for many of them to breathe and feel fully realized.

Far Cry expansions were great ways in which developers could try something new and wild. Sadly, New Dawn is not the case. The game feels safe, simple and generic. It's time to let the franchise rest and let some new ideas flow.