The end of the world doesn’t have to be a dull experience

Far Cry New Dawn offers a brightly-coloured look at life after the apocalypse — and it’s definitely worth your time.

It’s a well-known fact that painting flames on your machine gun will make it fire faster and look cooler as you clear out enemy bases.

Just because the world has ended doesn’t mean you can’t have a good time, right?

Far Cry New Dawn certainly thinks so, bringing a vibrant and colourful aesthetic to a setting traditionally renowned for dull earth colours and rubble — and making sure there’s plenty of ways for players to have some fun in the process, too.

Developed by Ubisoft for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, the game is a sequel to Far Cry 5 that ended with World War III kicking off and atomic bombs detonating all over the place.

In Far Cry New Dawn, set 17 years after the event — albeit still in Hope County, Montana — you play a security captain who has been called in as part of a specialist team to help rebuild the region and chase out a vicious outlaw gang known as The Highwaymen, led by twin sisters Mickey and Lou.

While Far Cry New Dawn is a stand-alone game in its own right, those who played its predecessor will get more out of it — from revisiting old locations to seeing how major characters have fared in the 17 years since the bombs fell.

I didn’t like the ending to Far Cry 5 at all, so I welcomed the chance to revisit Hope County and see how it had turned out. I found the game to be a tighter, more focused experience than Far Cry 5 — there’s still plenty to do, but you’re looking at a maybe 20 hour campaign and reasonable side mission stuff.

The end of the world is a surprisingly colourful place, even if it is held together with duct tape and spare parts.

Fighting bandits remains an important part of Far Cry New Dawn.

While the driving and shooting mechanics haven’t changed much, there are some tweaks to the way upgrades and the like are earned. Instead of wandering all over the map looking for a legendary panther to kill so you can make an ammunition bandolier, you spend perk points (gained from completing challenges, rescuing prisoners and doing assorted stuff in the world) to upgrade your abilities.

While Far Cry 5 took itself far too seriously, New Dawn isn’t afraid to get a bit silly and have some fun with itself. From a scout trying to recreate a post-apocalyptic paper-based version of Wikipedia based on things other people have told him about the website to a 70-year old grandmother with a deadly accurate eye, a Dragunov sniper rifle and a failing memory, the world is full of larger-than life characters that add to the sense of fun.

The game is delightfully chaotic as well — one of the weapons is a sawblade launcher, which does exactly what it says on the tin and fires saw blades at things — and they bounce off objects too. When attacking one outpost, I launched a sawblade at a guard, and it went through him, bounced off the wall behind him, opened the lock on a nearby cage with a vicious cougar in it, then detonated a fuel drum that promptly set everything nearby — including the cougar — on fire.

Being on fire is not a natural state of affairs for a cougar and it was not a happy kitty and started running about mauling Highwaymen — while still being on fire — setting off more explosions in the process as fuel drums lit up. Firing an M60 machine gun at random into the affray ramped the chaos up further, and while this “Giggle Switch On” approach earned no points for subtlety, it was a lot of fun — and rather effective, too, since pyro-cougar took out most of the guards for me and allowed me to liberate the outpost in fairly short order.

It might be the same setting as Far Cry 5, but the world looks very different this time around.

The fact the game is willing to have more fun with its premise means a lot of stuff that would seem out of place in a more “realistic” game (like “how come a gang of post-apocalyptic marauders have access to multi-engined cargo aeroplanes?”) can just be shrugged off as part of the surrealist experience, too.

I liked the Expeditions mechanic as well, whereby your Quebecois helicopter pilot Roger will whisk you outside Hope County to a range of locations including a beached Royal Navy aircraft carrier, a bridge across the Grand Canyon and a flooded theme park in Louisiana. The expeditions were a good way to get lots of crafting resources (not that I was ever short of them), with the difficulty and rewards escalating each time you replayed them. While the levels were fun, I generally didn’t need the resources they provided — there were more than enough in the game world.

Enemies get more difficult as you replay outposts and expeditions, but you can team up with a friend to take them on in co-op too, which provides for some fun times, especially if you’re both on the same page regarding stealth — or just want to go loud and see where the party takes you.

The multi-coloured Mad Max vibe works really well — I spent many hours travelling around the game world in my modified car armed with a sawn-off double-barrelled shotgun and a friendly dog in the passenger seat — and without spoiling anything, I will say I liked the generally upbeat tone of New Dawn and thought it was a satisfying epilogue to Far Cry 5.

It’s a crowded gaming calendar at the moment, but Far Cry New Dawn is definitely worth making some time for.

Originally published as The end of the world doesn’t have to be a dull experience