Far Cry New Dawn review: An eye-searingly colourful expansion that isn’t afraid to have some fun

The statute of limitations is probably up on Far Cry 5 spoilers, especially given that this stand-alone sequel, which takes place in the primary-coloured and strangely bucolic wasteland of irradiated post-apocalypse Montana, is set 17 years after the previous game’s finale.

The last game ended when deranged evangelist Joseph Seed unexpectedly dropped a nuke on the county, in what must be the biggest win for a bad guy this side of the most recent Avengers film (on which the statute of limitations on spoilers is also surely up).

Luckily for players not ready to leave Far Cry 5’s vast open world behind, the nuclear blast wasn’t terminal. Quite the opposite in fact, the recovering landscape has mutated into a sort of Mad Max meets Woodstock acid trip wonderland, where purple flowers grow everywhere, guns are way more fun and the wildlife looks a little bit wrong.

You play a nameless, faceless interloper in the overgrown ruins of a now unfamiliar Hope County, sent to rescue the local survivors from a tyrannical group of baddies called the Highwaymen.

You do this by traipsing around the over-saturated countryside amassing the new currency of the hour, ethanol, to fortify and grow the resistance’s home base, as well as upgrade your own abilities.

It’s very deliberately more of the same stuff for hungry Far Cry fans. You’ve got the familiar, irresistible gameplay loop of liberating camps from the enemy, which is now bolstered by the ability to re-liberate them at will later on, with tougher enemies to defeat and higher rewards for your troubles. Guns for hire are back, giving you an AI teammate to rely upon to provide support and to pull you out of a sticky situation.

A new type of mission even lets you depart Hope County entirely, to visit one-off locations such as abandoned theme parks, Alcatraz and the remains of a crashed space station. Like the heavily ironic and 1980s themed Blood Dragon expansion before it, New Dawn is Ubisoft at its most uninhibited, and flexing the sort of creative muscles it tends to rein in for the more safe and straightlaced numbered games in the series.

These in-between Far Cry games are the series at its very strangest, and also at its most fun.