A rotating yellow pill marked with the word new

What film did Rob watch last? Rob’s Tatwatch Blog!

Oh no, Rob is… Going on about games.

art by rob

about that rob

dare you enter the tomb?

home

Punching Robots 2084

With Your Host, Rob Remakes

Adventures in New Dawn

Posted on this, the day of our Molyneux,

by

Rob
and filed under

in our entirely accurate databanks

A black and white picture from Far Cry: New Dawn. It's the player caught mid dance.

I know it’s almost like the Ubi-game fan club round these parts recently but I promise, that’s mainly because I’m clearing out a backlog of things I meant to post but didn’t.

I enjoyed my time with Far Cry 5 a lot though it certainly had its Very Ubisoft issues with magic villains and a side order of out of place Very Ubisoft nastiness, amongst other things.

It’s par for the course with the main entries into the Far Cry series, that’s 3 out of 3 now since folks settled on the icon clearing formula where the joyous systemic chaos of crashing a car into a tree, accidentally setting fire to some wildlife then getting into a boat just to crash that into a tree and now everything is on fire and is that a bear, oh no is offset by the edgy and ill fitting nonsense of a story.

Maybe I’d appreciate it more were I fourteen or something, I dunno! That was quite a long time ago now.

The inbetweeny games are where I look to for the more interesting stuff. Blood Dragon misfired as much as it worked but painful tutorial aside, made a great showcase for how well the base raiding silliness works with a lot of the peripheral stuff sidelined even further or removed entirely. Primal’s riff on survival clearly filtered through to Days Gone and stretched the formula a bit. New Dawn, on the other hand, felt a lot like the game I wanted Far Cry 5 to be.

With only a short interlude into absurd magic mans stuff and its embrace of allowing the player even more freedom with few interruptions, it fixed a lot of the issues of 5. Also! What an amazingly beautiful game!

Its colourful view of a post nuclear future incredibly at odds with the usual videogame grey and green dullness gave the folks working on the map rework the leeway to go to town. Still very much the photorealism of Ubi games that we’re used to but now with a slightly more fantastical bent and honestly, I loved it.

An in-game screenshot of a field. Purple flowers are dotted throughout grasslands. The sky is blue and a sign reads "garage" and "helipad"
It's a videogame screenshot of a body floating in a lake, taken from underneath the water, at night.
It's the player bursting through a fence on a motorbike
It's the player driving uphill on their motorbike with a dog in the sidecar.
It's the dog running through a forest
A painterly view of the same forest, a light mist covers the view.
A black and white shot of the player walking forlornly through some burnt out woods.
A view from inside a derelict boat storage area, looking out to the lake. A lantern is lit at the front of the picture.
A dust track by the burnt out woods. It is morning and somewhat eerily misty.
A man with a motorcycle helmet on, welding a flamethrower in the woods at night. The area surrounding them is on fire.
The dog looks out of the window of a van, their tongue is sticking out.
A black and white mysteriously lit shot of a power generator at night.
An absolutely great looking sheep.
The player wearing a leather jacket and a fetching hat with their arms raised as though appealing to heaven.
A wooden water wheel, in the fog, on fire.
A worryingly realistic picture of the in-game forest.
The player squares off against a turkey whilst defensively holding a shotgun.
The player dives into a lake. In the distance, a forest and mountain.

Share this post?

Google is broken, social media is fragmented (this one, at least, is a good thing) the internet is an AI toilet. Getting someone to look at your stuff on online is getting ridiculously rough. Sharing a post amongst chums or the internet at large helps loads. So here’s some buttons! Wahey!

You are reading Rob’s Punching Robots Club

The online home of Rob Fearon, disabled videogame maker, games journalist, crap film watcher, gobshite and doodler. Rob’s been around games a very, very long time now and Punching Robots Club is their personal blog featuring whatever nonsense takes their fancy.

Sometimes it’s a sketch, a review, an article about videogames, a pointer to something Rob finds cool. Whatever, really. Expect anything, Rob’s tired of being a brand online and so it’s just stuff and things these days. Nice stuff and things, mind you.