Far Cry: New Dawn Final Impressions

So, last night my gamin' buddy and I finished Far Cray new Dawn and I thought I'd follow up the last post with my thoughts now that the game is completed.  Warning! There be spoilers ahead.

I stand by the impressions of combat, driving, graphics and environment as they are great and the mechanics feel good.  Unfortunately I don't recommend it for the story.  In short, the story stinks.  The story is full of forced scenes that do not make much sense in how they unfold.  It may be that I have been influenced by having a spouse that is a writer, or that I am thinking too much about it, however I found myself watching the cut scenes and thinking "what the F***?"

In the beginning, you are cornered by the twins and the obvious choices you have are to either open fire and try to kill them or jump off a cliff, but you don't get the choice, so you are forced to jump.  Now I'm not a jump kind of guy, so I would have opted to take the chance and wipe out the baddie leadership when I had the opportunity. Hell I had a light machine gun with a full belt of ammo when this happened.

Next time you are confronted with the twins it's just you, them and a hostage.  Again, I had an up-scaled LMG and a full belt, could I take a shot then?  Hell no.  They tell you to handcuff yourself so they can beat you.senseless and then kill the hostage anyway.  Yeah, I didn't see that coming (that's sarcasm by the way).  There's also a similar set of scenes with Mr. Seed and his son.

I don't like it when games are "on rails" where you are forced down a specific path.  It shouldn't be so difficult to engineer a couple of endings and allow some choice during the story cut-scenes that will affect the ending you have as the game winds down.  This sort of design laziness really does not make the game very open-world as was advertised.

So what about the open-world aspect?  It's extremely limited.  The outposts you have to take are few and easily taken while the "game world" is very small.  So you take over all the gang's outposts, after all you are supposed to be driving them out of the area, the story proceeds like you haven't taken over any completely ignoring what is actually happening.  I felt I was entering alternate dimensions half the time.  You can even find the prison where the gang takes all the people it kidnaps, but if you go there you find a little loot and zero people until the story decides you have to go there.

To conclude, I felt the game has very strong mechanics for combat, driving and environment but it falls down horribly when integrating the story with the "open world" aspects.  I could not recommend it as a AAA title at an AAA price.  My advice:  Wait for a sale if you still want to play it and maybe pay for it at 60% off.