At first sight, Another Dawn gives off some pretty heavy Far Cry vibes. Aside from the bug-riddled Far Cry 5, the series has been something that I have devoted a lot of my time to in the past and was eager to jump into something similar since Far Cry 6 has been delayed until god knows when of 2021, if we’re lucky. It’s always been somewhat cathartic to sneak around camps filled to the brim with dimwitted AI mercs and pick them off one by one. Shortly after jumping into this though, I could tell this wasn’t the game for me. Or anyone for that matter.

The game starts off seemingly strong, with you sitting along a picturesque island in the middle of the ocean after receiving a panicked call from a woman in distress on what appears to be a CB radio that still gives off the “your call cannot be completed” token verbiage that anyone who’s ever been given a bum number from a girl at a bar will know all too well. I took note of how the beams of light looked realistic, as did the rippling water filled with schools of clownfish, and then as my nameless avatar puts down his hands, I noticed I could see right through them. This was far from game-breaking, but it did raise a red flag that I wasn’t even through the brief in-engine cut scene before running into glitches.

As I gained control of my character, it became immediately evident that this game wasn’t going to be all that great. The right stick moves at the speed of Speedy Gonzalez on crack, which can be slightly adjusted in the settings, so looking up or down is a downright chore. After adjusting this, I was able to successfully jump off of the boat and make my way to the island, which from a distance looked decent enough. However, upon closer inspection, pretty much every asset looks like it was cut and paste into the engine from MS Paint or created in the original Far Cry’s level creator with texture popping, screen tearing, and downright ugly items as far as the eye can see. Having little to no direction other than to find my backpack, I set off into the unknown.

I made my way to a shanty village not too far from the shore, shocked to find a few corpses that looked like they were blowup dolls with some tomato paste on or around them. I collected a few items, including a screwdriver, because I guess if John Wick can kill someone with a pencil, Joe-schmo or whatever my character’s name is can use a screwdriver, right? Well, not so much. I walked up to our first guard, which is named Bob. I know this because Bob killed my ass at least six times before making any progress, even when he had no business doing so. Bob is a shoot first and asks questions later kind of guy, who had the audacity to run away from me after seeing me sitting in some deep brush waiting for him to turn his back, all the while leaning forward and shooting straight down into the ground as he fled the scene of my upcoming murder. On multiple occasions, he has run straight up a moderately sloped hill that I can only walk around the edges of, has gone headfirst into the ocean and traveled along the floor in a way that I could only assume Aquaman could, or just turned around and shot me from the complete opposite end of his normal point A straight to point B patrol when I was carefully creeping at a snail’s pace, crouched in one of the bungalows.

Begrudgingly, I dropped the difficulty down to easy, which seemed to change nothing but the fact that Bob had to land around six shots as opposed to four to end my suffering, only to respawn back on the boat to start the endeavor over anew. After an hour or so of stumbling around the quaint village from Hell, I managed to deliver some much-needed payback to Bob by sprinting around the back of the huts, running at full speed the whole way, only ducking down when at arm’s length, and snuck the last couple of feet until the much deserved “Kill” prompt appeared. I really expected some brutal, well-animated execution, but what I was given was a lame-duck poke made by my right hand which made Bob keel over like a sack of hammers. I was overjoyed to see he had dropped a pistol when he clearly had an SMG, but a gun is a gun when it comes to warfare… only to be disappointed again by being told I need my backpack before I can carry a gun, all the while having a completely free left hand that just flails around if it isn’t clipping through walls and the like.

I was able to push forward a little deeper into the shantytown to find the precious backpack, and acquire the previously mentioned gun, only to be mowed down almost instantly by Patrick, Bob’s surviving brother in arms. It was a rather short battle, in which I noticed that there isn’t a vibration function at all (which feels off when it’s absent), nor is there a health bar on the HUD. Instead, there’s stamina, hunger, and thirst, because a shoddy AI, complete lack of map or waypoint, and horrid graphics were not enough – we need survival mechanics included as well. When you’re approaching death, you might get a pop-up on the left if you’re lucky, but most of the time you get this faint red ooze that slowly appears on the screen, I am assuming signaling blood. Just to see what happens, I let the game run idle on the boat to see exactly how long I could survive without food or water, and it’s less than five minutes on the normal difficulty (that the game keeps defaulting to upon each death), which hardly promotes the stealth gameplay. Does anyone remember Sam Fisher, any of the Brotherhood of Assassins, or Corvo stopping mid-mission to look for food or water? No? Me either.

I’ve now tried just sneaking around the guards entirely, going in guns (er… screwdrivers) blazing against both of the non-Nickelodeon affiliated characters, and every combination of tactics imaginable, and I’m still stuck at the opening area. I’ve officially thrown in the towel and chalked Another Dawn up as another attempt to mimic a tried and true formula, only to fall short in every facet.

1 out of 10

Pros

• The Bugs and Issues Come to Light Immediately

Cons

• Horrid AI
• Unforgiving Difficulty
• Lack of Direction
• Visual Bugs and Inconsistencies Across the Board

Another Dawn was developed and published by KR Games. It was released on PC, X1, and XSX. The game was provided to us for review on XSX. If you’d like to see more of Another Dawn, check out the Developer’s site.

 

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