

The villains this time around are a pair of twins named Mickey and Lou, leaders of a bandit group called the Highwaymen. This franchise has always had a bit of a Mad Max vibe, but it didn’t really fit with Far Cry 5’s modern American setting, where the player was just supposed to accept that law enforcement was letting Seed’s murderous cult run amok. The post-apocalyptic trappings in New Dawn work much better as a justification for the usual Far Cry shenanigans than those in Far Cry 5 did. It’s like everyone emerged from their fallout shelters and immediately realized there were no longer any social norms to stop them from making everything vaporwave. The revamped aesthetic is more appealing: Permanent auroras shimmer in the distance and neon-pink flowers and graffiti are everywhere. It turns out a lot of people in fictional Hope County, Montana, are preppers. In this sequel, you play as a new unnamed character referred to only as the Captain, and get reacquainted with everyone who was fortunate enough to survive the blast.

It’s set 17 years after Far Cry 5, which ended with a deus-ex-machina nuclear war that devastated much of society, and trapped the player’s character in a bunker with Joseph Seed, the game’s main antagonist. New Dawn uses an altered portion of Far Cry 5’s open-world Montana setting, telling a tighter, better story in the process. For the past few development cycles, however, the Far Cry franchise has tried a new approach: Rather than put out an entirely different game every year, it has alternated between larger mainline iterations (last year’s Far Cry 5, for instance) and smaller sequels, like Far Cry: New Dawn, out on PS4, Xbox One, and Microsoft tomorrow. When it comes to open-world games, the maxim is usually that “bigger is better.” For developer and publisher Ubisoft, that often means cramming a game’s map with missions, side-quests, and all manner of diversions that would take anyone with any semblance of a life many months to complete.
