Looks like I've beaten almost every mainline Far Cry game by now. Only ones I havn't finished are Primal and Blood dragon. Well they all operate on the same foundations so whats different this time?
Luckily this one is co-op, sometimes Far Cry games arent. So thats a big determining factor in my motivation to play it. This time , In New Dawn it takes place after the events of FC5 and you're in this big multicolored land playing on the side of some kind of rebel forces to conquer this oppressive rival gang, or something.
Everything goes back to this sort of central hub zone called Prosperity. This is a sort of different and unique mechanic to the Far Cry franchise, in this game you have a main base that you can collect resouces in order to work towards further upgrading and progressing your base. Unfortunately, only the Host can actually interact with this mechanic and upgrades, while the co op partner just twiddles his thumbs and collects all sorts of resouces for basically no reason. Atleast in this game the co-op partner can actually upgrade his weapons, unlike FC5, where the partner couldn't even purchase weapons/upgrades.
So you have this hub base, and it needs all sorts of upgrades. Things like a health station, which increases your max health, a Cartography station which allows you to see resources on your map, a Garage which is used to purchase new vehicles/helicoptors, a Weapon bench, which is used to buy better tiers of weapons.
The main way you upgrade your base is by 'Ethonal" which you can only get by conquering enemy outposts. The game kind of does a poor job at explaining any of this to you, and it doesn't even really introduce any outposts to you. We didnt figure it out for the first few hours, and had to google exactly how to get ethonal. But after that, we found it pretty enjoyable to just freeroam around the map and look for outposts to destroy in order to work towards getting upgrades.
However, the only real motivation we had for upgrades was
1) Unlock a helicoptor ASAP. If it was anything like previous games, then land vehicles become completely pointless as soon as you have access to the much faster air travel
2) Unlock the higher tier weapons, for obvious reasons.
So the way the weapons work is its in tiers, there are 4 tiers, by default you are on tier 1. For the first 6 hours or so of the game we would just use the default starter weapons as it kind of felt pointless to waste resouces on anything but the absolute highest tier of weapon.So we would go around the map conquering outposts to eventually unlock the highest tier of weapons.
And the combat in Far Cry: New Dawn is largely unchanged from previous games, except in this game it sort of feels a much more emphesis on RPG mechanics and sort of 'stat' based combat. For example, there are various 'tiers' of enemies. There are your default easy guys, then theres guys with purple/yellow healthbars which mean theyre much harder 'elites'. And good luck killing these guys with basic tier 1 weapons. This and the fact that all enemies have healthbars, and you can see damage numbers now when you damage them, made the game feel much more RPG/stat oreientated than previous games. This is both a pro/con as it does encouage you to work towards getting higher tier weapons and keeps it exciting to unlock new things, but its also a con in that it feels kind of cheap in the sense that skill doesnt matter as much , only if you put in the grind to get better weapons.
So for the first half of the game it included a lot of slowly walking around to objectives becuase we lacked basic transportation, doing a lot of side missions and outposts to unlock helicoptor/good weapons, and doing some straight forward but enjoyable main story missions that included a lot of invading enemy bases and killing them mostly.
After we unlocked a helicoptor the game became a breeze, to collect all the resouces became much easier and we quickly after unlocked the highest tier weapons, effectievly reducing all previous tiers worthless. This is also a problem, most of the weapons in the game are rendered pointless as soon as you unlock the highest tier. And unfortunately the weapons in general arent that exciting or enticing to use anyway, they all look like strapped together DIY stupid shit and none of them really were that appealing to be honest.
Then as soon as we entered the last half of the game a message showed up 'Part II" and from this point on it was all down hill. It introduces the religious cult leader guy from FC5, and that really did not seem promising. Once the excitement of needing ot go around doing side missions for resources was complete, we no longer had any real motiviation to do any more side missions (which were admittedly the highlight of the game) - Also, the Steam version completely lacks achievements for whatever reason, so that further just killed any motivation to do anymore side quests. Well once all of that was done and over with, the second part of the campaign was pretty horrible. I counted 6 or 7 missions in a row after the first part of the game, where we didnt even use our weapons. Anything from completely tedious banal shit like driving down a river in a boat, having to do awful puzzles where you allign some visuals to progress, to being shoved in some generic gladiator arena doing fist fights, to more gimmicky shit like a round arena destruction derby, to other missions where you just get teleported to..ANOTHER arena where you just shoot at a bear with arrows... The second half of the game is seriously weak and all of the missions SUCK. Like, actually all of them. Every single main story mission after the first half was just totally boring and you barely even get to shoot anyone with all the weapons we aquired. Theres a prison mission where, guess what, another mission where you dont even have your guns, and you kind of sneak around awkwardly to sneak out or something, then eventually pickup some enemy weapons. I mean it was kind of interesting, but the fact that its like the 8th mission in a row that takes your guns away was like mindblowingly stupid.
The story is some completely boring attempt to continue the story of FC5, which I thought was horrible and boring/uninteresting, all of the cutscenes are boring and mockable, the characters totally forgettable and generic, even the main villians which is a staple for FC, are extremely trite and no depth. Two sisters who are just "Bad guys" thats it. Theres no moral grey area or anything. Its just "Oh look, two hoodlum sisters that do bad things like stab people in the throat in front of you and kill people for fun!" its just totally stupid and a total let down compared to even previous FC villians.
The game does have brilliant graphics, techincally. I mean they definitely went overboard with all the pink flowers EVERYWHERE it looks totally unnatural, but if you get past that, then techincally there are a lot of breathtaking vistas and draw distances to soak in. Many times you can look out on the horizon and it seems photo-realistic, it is a very polished AAA game, I just feel the art design its self is totally lacking stylistically and is not appealing. Theres some like tattoo-esque grafitti all over the place, everything is pink and purple, it just leaves a bad tacky taste in my mouth. Like they hired some amateur wanna be tattoo artist on the developer team and made him design the whole game.
Also the driving is pretty hilarious its way too forgiving you can just drive offroad through millions of trees and rocks without any penalty you vehicle barely takes damage, its not really good or bad it just looks funny. But once you get helicoptor you wont care about driving anymore.
Funny enough, everything BESIDES the main story is the best part about New Dawn. There is an extra side activity called 'Expeditions' where it transports you to various scenarios where you must go inside an enemy base and find a package, then escape to the getaway, we found these really fun and cool to do. They are the only way to aquire Circuit Boards which is what you need to unlock the best weapons, also the game didn't explain this at all anywhere, so another failure of game design. We had to look up how to aquire Circuit boards, the game doesnt tell you. But yeah, those, and the outposts, were really fun. And we almost considered doing all of them, but then the lack of achievements ruined it.
The actual gunplay is decent and enjoyable enough, despite the lack of variety of actually viable weapons because of the awkward psuedo-RPG tier system, the graphics are great except for some artistic desicions, as a co-op experience its pretty great to just fly around with your buddy and collect all sorts of resouces, but sadly as soon as you return to the campaign- ESPCIALLY the second half of the game, it all falls apart and becomes totally shitty and lame with really boring main missions where you barely even engage in combat. Too many sections where youre forced to just follow around the same cliche generic "Sooo crazy" religious cult leader from FC5, just walking around listening to his dialogue, then doing some half assed gimicky mission, repeat til end credits. Also, its a really easy game without much struggle ever, on the default difficulty. Even the last boss was just two of those girl villians and they just looked like typical elites, took them out after 2 tries. Then the last last boss, was just some joke of a PS1 looking monkey that we killed first try.
I don't know if we'll ever get a fantastic Far cry campaign, so far all of them have had the groundwork to be amazing, but the awful design choices at Ubisoft always find some way to ruin it. Atleast this game is better than FC5, because it wasnt constantly taking control away, and the side quests were more enjoyable, but its just an OK co-op experience
6/10
No comments:
Post a Comment