Far Cry New Dawn

For some dumbass reason unknown to me at this time, I asked for a load of Far Cry games for Christmas. I got them all because they are fairly cheap at the moment and New Dawn became the first one of the three that I played because it had an obligatory multiplayer achievement and someone I knew was playing it at the same time as me.

Far Cry New Dawn follows the story of the Captain in a post nuclear world that follows on from Far Cry 5, another game included in the Christmas bonanza that also means I’ve played the games out of order, which may make Far Cry 5 slightly more interesting.

 

The characterisation is where Far Cry really excels and it does so again here with the twins, our antagonists. As soon as you meet them, you will want to kill them because they are just plain dicks. They are just the most terrible people and coupled with their psychopathic behaviour, they also appear immature which makes them even more grating. Knowing that the climax will ultimately lead to their deaths kept me going throughout the game.

 

So what’s ultimately my problem with Far Cry New Dawn? Did I say I have a problem with it? No? Well I do. To sum it’s that it’s a Far Cry game. They do most things well but that’s it. It’s a very safe franchise and as a result, despite how pretty they make the world and how clean the gameplay is, it ends up being a very dry and repetitive experience and I failed to see any major differences between the story here and that of Far Cry 4.

 

That’s where it’s the same but every game has to have a slight difference and New Dawn goes down the weapon crafting route. It is an apocalypse after all. This system does however, come across as very unbalanced. You start the game unable to craft bugger all and end up with ineffective guns when you go up against anything other than a pack of wild kittens. As the game progresses and you upgrade your base to be able to craft better guns, this quickly escalates to the point where even the hardened enemies go down easily. The game breaking point is when you get the legendary bow, which one-shots everything if you have the right perks (which you will) and shot enemies in the head. This feels kind of backwards – you expect a game to get harder as you progress, not easier. The enforcers – essentially bikers as they all wear motorcycle helmets – appear at the first stronghold you capture if you get spotted at level 2. All the game does as you progress is throw more of them at you.

 

In terms of the graphics, it’s very pretty and I must confess that they’ve gone out of their way to avoid the traditional brown/grey scenery as there is colour everywhere. Musically, I found it to be quite grating as it requires a lot of play time to get through and listening to the same stuff over and over again is not fun and when the menu music is noticeable, it’s bad.

 

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 50 Achievements

 

It’s another long list and one that doesn’t give you much for the main story – 5 whole achievements. That said, there’s a lot of points for upgrading your stronghold and getting the better guns and perks. Essentially, playing the game how it’s intended to be played will net a fair whack of score.

There are some notable ones on the list that require some effort. Late in the game you will acquire some abilities that you need to use to unlock achievements. One of these is called Wrath which boosts your combat strength. The achievement in question requires you to kill ten enemies while Wrath is activated in one go. This is stupid as getting ten enemies together to do this is an absolute ball ache. It took me many, many attempts and swear words to finally get this done and the hard part really shouldn’t have been attracting enough enemies to do it.

 

The next one is for completing all Expeditions on level three. This boils down to performing seven different missions, three times, which, after you’ve done them all once, becomes tiresome very quickly. It just feels lazy and unnecessary to have you replay the same stuff only with slightly more difficult enemies. With the gun situation mentioned above, it doesn’t make it any harder.

 

This is also where the multiplayer element kicks in – you need to complete three of these expeditions in co-op with someone else. It’s the only part of the achievement list that requires a second player so what’s the point? Arbitrarily targeting achievement hunters and trying to get them to socialise for one measly achievement? I doubt it, but still.

 

The other few that provide a challenge are the hunting ones for catching every animal and collecting the skins. This is hard because the monstrous animals can actually be quite shy and you have to walk around the map for a while just trying to get them to show.

 

There is one more worth mentioning and that’s for driving a plane without wings over 100 metres in one go. This can actually be glitched though by throwing dynamite into a lake and driving over it. Get it right and you get catapulted into the air and earn a free achievement to boot. Having to do this without the glitch is frustrating as there’s only a few places on the map where it can actually be done.

 

Downloadable Content – N/A

 

Far Cry New Dawn is a perfectly fine open world exploration game with an okay story and setting. But that’s also its biggest problem – it’s so middle of the road that it becomes a fairly boring journey, annoyingly before it reaches its conclusion. I would recommend it for the bad guys alone though, but the 100% achievement completion is a bit of a grind.

Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition

I had absolutely no intention of playing Minecraft but when I was between games, I thought I would pick it up and hammer it out in about an hour – that was the impression I was given by the really low difficulty that people seemed to indicate came with it. Plus, it only had 400 points as an arcade release so I also thought I wouldn’t have to review it. But thank you Mojang for proving me completely wrong.

Firstly, the premise. It’s one I don’t really understand. You are a blockheaded character in a block world and you have to harvest your environment by constantly punching things until they turn into smaller collectible blocks which you can then use to build other stuff, turn into other stuff or cook in a furnace to turn into other stuff. And all to do... nothing really. That’s it. There is no real end goal that you explore the world to find. There is the Ender Dragon but unless I missed something tragic during my time playing, it’s not clearly advertised as an end goal, even though I suppose it is? I don’t know, I guess I would need to be more invested in the lore in order to get it.

The music is the most horrendous aspect of the game by far. It’s a real ‘kill yourself’ theme. There is no get up and go to it. You are just aimlessly wandering around and the music makes you feel like there is no real reward to survival. Dying makes the music stop. Winning.

I don’t really have a lot else to say about the game. The mechanics are simple enough and anything that isn’t clear is well explained in the tutorial, I just don’t get it myself.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 50 Achievements

So when I first started playing, I thought I would be done in five minutes and I would have been if I had a friend who was willing to help me. However, without a friend, it takes a very long time to get the On A Rail achievement as you have to collect enough resources to build 500m worth of train tracks. Unfortunately Iron doesn’t grow on trees and it takes a long time of exploring, building pickaxes, mining coal, mining iron ore, mining gold ore and mining redstone in order to build all of the materials required to craft a mine track of 500m. Oh, and you will need a mine cart as well.

There are 19 other achievements but they are all fairly straightforward and despite what some guides say, you can earn them all in the tutorial world.

There is not an achievement for killing the Ender Dragon in the original 20 Achievements

Downloadable Content

It’s a free DLC which will make people happy and it comes with 30 additional achievements for playing the game. There is more of the same stuff to do and chances are if you like Minecraft you have probably done it all already. However, there are a few ones that are problematic and I would probably still be playing the game if not for Deathdealer108 and Destroyer675000.

The first one is Sniper Duel which you get for killing a skeleton from 50 meters away. This is ridiculous. From 50 meters, you cannot even see the skeleton. This is where my friends come in to play. They have managed to capture a skeleton in a room and created a 50 meter long archery range. You had to aim somewhere in the sky in order to get your arrow to drop on to the skeleton and you had to do this twice with a normal bow to kill it. Doing it in the woods? Impossible. Another guide stated the best way to do it was to get 50 blocks of cobblestone and build a cobblestone tower directly below you after you find a skeleton, then simply shoot downwards.

Another one which I wouldn’t have got without help was the Zombie Doctor one. Deathdealer108 had managed to capture a zombie villager in a hut and had a convenient save slot and the right equipment to get the achievement, but I can imagine this would be a big ball ache trying to do it from scratch.

Selected others include killing the Ender Dragon and entering an End Portal. Joining someone who had already found the End Portal made this loads easier than it otherwise would have been.

The last one worth mentioning, as other people seem to have struggled with it, it is killing a Ghast with its own fireball. I think I got lucky with this. I used my potion of fire resistance and dived into some lava. The Ghast followed me in and I just hovered trying to swim out of the lava, level with the Ghast and just hit his fireballs until he died. This was also a lot easier than some of the videos I watched for it!

The last achievement I unlocked was for the playing the game for 100 in-game days which is the equivalent to 33 hours and 20 minutes worth of play. I did this after I finished my rail track and simply left it running over night for several nights until the achievement unlocked. I understand that this unlocked instantly after getting the DLC for most people as they had already invested this much time in it before. I’m not sure what they would have been doing though.

The only scenario in which I will play Minecraft again is if they release more DLC for it just to keep the 100%. I’m not one of these people who will invest time in it for ‘fun’ as I simply don’t see the ‘fun’ element. I can now officially say that after giving it a go.