Very Quick Tips: Far Cry: New Dawn

Five o’clock post-apoc rock

Far Cry: New Dawn is out, and as usual there’s some crafty mechanics to manage. Crafty, get it? Because Far Cry by and large focuses on crafting.

Hold your applause until the end.

General tips:

• This goes for pretty much every Ubisoft game, but head to Club Ubi first and grab some free weapons. There’s a really great (sidearm) shotgun that should help early on, as well as an infinitely-spawning shovel melee weapon.

• You want to keep making headway through the campaign so you can start earning some of the better upgrades and unlock more potential skills. As a result, when your first bottleneck arrives, upgrade the three cheapest parts of your base ( the bottom rung) to continue the story.

• To upgrade your base you need to take enemy bases: otherwise known as “Outposts.” Look for them on the map by their telltale sign of smokestacks and look for a big yellow post with a green light first to disable their sole alarm. Re-up the outpost by “scavenging” it on the world map to re-take it and earn more base upgrading materials.

  Always re-take them once immediately: level two simply adds one more alarm and isn’t much harder than level one. Take on level three later on. Remember that you don’t need to return to your base to upgrade it, as you can deploy upgrades through the map.

• Craft, craft, craft: it’s arguably more important in New Dawn than any other Far Cry game. Upgrades aren’t just of the innocuous “hold more items” variety: weapons need to be crafted and directly impact some of the tougher boss fights in the game.

• Don’t bother crafting an advanced bow early on: you get one for free midway through the story.

Vague non-spoiler-ridden story tips:

• I’m going to keep this vague and non-spoilery, but when you get to the part with the pink lights on an island, make sure you shoot or melee the boards and use fire to burn the vines. Again, it’s vague, but you’ll know what I mean and won’t drive yourself insane in the process.

• Similarly, on the part with the boat down the river, don’t forget that you can swap to fire arrows with R1 while holding L1. Molotov cocktails crafted on the fly will also burn key objectives when needed.

• Near the end of the game there will be a huge bottleneck. To forge through this you’ll need to greatly enhance your weaponry to level three/gold. If you haven’t done expeditions yet (side missions that take you to a separate instanced map) go do them! Just two basic difficulty runs should earn you enough materials to craft two to three gold weapons. That’s more than enough to carry you through the entire game.