

Veterans of Far Cry 5 will recognise this repurposed settlement as the ruins of John Seed’s ranch. Your base of operations is one of the standout new features in New Dawn. In what amounts to a familiar Far Cry opening, after your train is ambushed, you must assemble and strengthen your team of friendly survivors to subjugate the bandit big bads. You play as a new – but still silent – protagonist who’s part of a group that clash with the Highwaymen over critical resources. Thankfully, these miscreants are not the only human survivors roaming the wastes of this new United States. Headed by new bleach-blonde twin baddies Mickey and Lou, this motley band are particularly nasty bandits that use the remnants of Far Cry 5’s era to raise hell with makeshift weaponry and scavenged resources. If you’re in that camp, the game only costs 45 euros, which is somewhere between a major expansion and a full triple-A release.īut it isn’t just flowers that are populating the revitalised Hope County: a ragtag gang wearing Motocross armour called the Highwaymen have entered the scene, screeching to the fill the void left by the Peggies. Yes, New Dawn shares Far Cry 5’s setting, which might disappoint anyone who can muster up the excitement for another game in the series so soon. In the decade or so that follows the so-called ‘good’ and now canonical Far Cry 5 ending, a devastating drought makes way for a nuclear winter that irrevocably transforms the once-idyllic Hope County. You’d be forgiven for thinking that all-out war would draw a fiery line under the nefarious activities of Joseph Seed and his followers but, actually, it’s just the beginning. Less than a year after the arrival of the cult-killing romp through the American prairies that was Far Cry 5 we have New Dawn, a standalone sequel that takes place 17 years after ‘The Collapse’, the nuclear annihilation of Earth for which the crazed cult were preparing.


Far Cry games are like buses of late, albeit ones that zoom off a cliff in a ball of fire: two have come along at once, or at least in quick succession.
