Far Cry: New Dawn Is Now A Fallout-Esque Apocalyptic RPG--Here's What That Means

By committing to Far Cry's increasingly outlandish tone, New Dawn feels like a cohesive experience. The spin-off's location of choice--the same Hope County, Montana, except this time 17 years after Far Cry 5's nuclear apocalypse--is a wild and extraordinary locale. Exotic plants and strange irradiated animals litter the fictional US setting, with a brighter color palette making the region more interesting to look at throughout your adventures than it was pre-armageddon.

The visuals, then, take on an almost Borderlands-like look, but New Dawn's gameplay features evoke memories of a popular Bethesda series: Fallout. Aside from the post-apocalypse comparison, New Dawn also borrows some of Fallout's RPG tendencies. You have a base town, named Prosperity, whose constituent parts are upgradable over the course of the game. By leveling up the Infirmary, for example, you increase your maximum health; by leveling up your Garage, you can summon better vehicles; by leveling up your Healing Garden, you can craft more potent medkits; and by leveling up your Expeditions, you can go on new missions to smaller, far-flung locations around the US, such as an aircraft carrier in Florida and the Navajo Bridge in Arizona.

This distinct upgrade system pervades many of the game's mechanics. Weapons each have a Rank (from 1 for a rusty old pistol to 4 for a state-of-the-art suppressed sniper rifle), and while it doesn't appear possible to rank guns up directly, you can access higher-level gear by upgrading Prosperity's Workbench. Outposts return too, and these also possess a rank indicating how much of a challenge infiltrating each is likely to be. Once you take over any given Outpost, you can "scavenge" it, pillaging all its Ethanol (the primary currency used to upgrade armaments and craft new gear) and surrendering control back to the enemy. After this, the Outpost will rise to Rank 2, meaning higher-rank enemies--yes, they have ranks too--will defend it when you return. These more imposing enemies possess greater armor and weapons, and will be impervious to certain attacks until you purchase perks using skill points, a system that looks to be largely unchanged since Far Cry 5.

Guns for Hire return, and they're as absurd as you'd expect. A new dog named Timber and boar named Horatio have ousted Boomer and Cheeseburger, though Hope County's expert in Getting On My Nerves, Hurk, unfortunately survived the end of the world. You can also play in co-op with a human friend, but I'm personally looking forward to playing with Nana, an elderly woman who wields a sniper rifle. Miss you, Gran.

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Far Cry: New Dawn might not be a huge departure from Far Cry 5--it contains the same map and many of the same characters, after all. But Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon and Far Cry: Primal show that these spin-offs can be enjoyable experiences in their own right, and New Dawn is shaping up to be another of those crazy experiences nobody saw coming.