Far Cry® New Dawn

I went in expecting a quick cash-grab expansion and came out having spent a solid weekend on it, which tells you something. New Dawn is a first-person open-world shooter set in a post-nuclear Hope County, Montana, picking up 17 years after Far Cry 5's ending. You play as the Captain, a mute customisable protagonist, building up a settlement called Prosperity while fighting off the Highwaymen, a raider gang led by twin sisters Mickey and Lou. It is, by any honest measure, Far Cry 5 with light RPG scaffolding bolted on top. Whether that's a problem depends entirely on how you feel about Far Cry 5. The core shooting loop is fine. Gunplay is responsive, stealth outpost clearing still has that satisfying rhythm, and the Guns for Hire companion system gives you a solid co-op-adjacent experience even in solo play. The headlining new mechanic is a four-tier weapon and enemy ranking system: guns and enemies fall into ranks 1 through 3 plus Elite, and you need crafted weapons to match enemy tiers or you will waste magazines on standard mobs. In practice this creates a resource loop where you scavenge ethanol from Highwayman convoys and outposts, pump it into Prosperity to unlock the weapons workshop, and craft your way up the tier ladder. It works well enough in the middle hours. The saw launcher, a chainsaw-blade crossbow you build in the opening mission, sets a promising tone for post-apocalyptic improvised weaponry. The problem is that it turns out to be the only genuinely unique weapon in the game. The rest of the arsenal is standard Far Cry guns with scrap glued to the side, which is a missed opportunity given the setting. Weapon customisation is also shallow: upgrading is mostly a percentage damage bump with no attachment swapping, which will frustrate anyone who likes tinkering with loadouts. The tiered Outposts are the best thing New Dawn adds to the formula. You can reset cleared outposts to a higher difficulty rank and retake them for better ethanol rewards, which gives the game genuine replay value in a way Far Cry 5 never managed. Expeditions, which airdrop you into locations outside Hope County to grab a package and extract under fire, are a fun change of scenery. Both modes hold up in online co-op, which is smooth and functional. The main story clocks in at around 11-12 hours on a direct run, though doing side content and outpost farming pushes playtime to 20-30 hours. The narrative is the weakest part: Mickey and Lou have presence but spend most of the game yelling at you over a radio, and the mute protagonist kills any emotional investment in the final act. Joseph Seed returns and his scenes are genuinely the best writing in the game, which probably says more about the new characters than it does about him. Bullet sponge final bosses are a recurring complaint across reviews and it is accurate. If you grind side content before the finale, you can also overcook your loadout to the point where late-game tension collapses entirely. The resource economy is oddly generous if you play organically, meaning the crafting system that is supposed to create pressure mostly disappears before the credits roll. There are microtransactions for crafting materials and perk points, but they are entirely ignorable since the game hands out resources freely enough that paying for them would be pointless. On PC, performance is solid on the Far Cry 5 engine and the game has no notable technical issues at this point in its life. The honest version is this: New Dawn is a weekend rental that accidentally became a full game. If you played Far Cry 5 and liked the sandbox but wanted a cleaner progression hook, this gives you that. If you never finished Far Cry 5 or actively disliked it, nothing here changes the equation. Go in at a discount, do the outposts, bring a friend for co-op, and stop expecting it to be something it never tried to be. Fred, Scout Team