Close to finishing up Far Cry New Dawn. It's definitely a much smaller game compared to FC 5, as far as map, and missions. They have a lot of repeatable assault locations you can do for resources, like....a lot. They fully embraced the radiant missions on smaller maps idea with this game. So much so, that I suspect it's going to be in FC 6, in some form. Given the most recent FC 6 trailer talks about liberating locations, and building them up. I hope it's improved on this system in New Dawn, as it's not that great. Or, well the homebase upgrades are fine, giving your incremental improvements to various functions and abilities. But, the outposts are pretty useless. You can't upgrade them, so they only have a minimal defense, they are really nothing more than fast travel locations. But, if you have Expeditions upgraded to lvl 2, you can FT to any location, making them only useful in the early game, as far as FT is concerned.
The perks are very limited to, you will quickly unlock all of them if you are being a diligent explorer, but some of them have infinite ranks, so you can continue to improve. At first, all you can infinitely upgrade are either your ammo capacity for all types, and your fist/kick damage. Which I've seen people state online, that you can eventually upgrade it to the point you are One Punch Man. I'm not that high into it yet, but I am tempted to try it, as it is pretty fun to punch buffalo and the like. Later on, you will unlock a new set of perks, that give you more versatility with your combat, but they can't be infinitely upgraded. Still, they are pretty strong, so they are useful. Once you max out the weapon crafting station, you can infinitely upgrade weapons, but it's a resource hog, so that can take a while. Still, I have focused on upgrading my Elite Sniper Rifle to the point that I can almost one shot any enemy with armor piercing rounds.
The resources are gated a little strangely. You have various crafting resources (duct tape, gears, springs, etc), and then Ethanol. All of the facility upgrades, use Ethanol, but your weapon crafting, uses components. To get Ethanol, you have to go deal with the biker gang run by The Twins. The outposts you can liberate, give you ethanol, but only once, they don't provide an ongoing supply or anything. If you want more ethanol, you have to give up the outpost, and let them reclaim it. You can then attack it again (hello radiant missions), but the difficulty goes up a rank (1-3). If you reclaim it, you get even more ethanol....once....and then you give it up again. And repeat. It's the quickest way to get large amounts of ethanol, but it's kind of tedious. I usually try and do the outposts stealthy, as you get bonus ethanol if you go undetected. But, I find it's easier to just rush in, loud and kill them all fast, and just repeat it again, rather than take my time. I can do 2 outpost runs if I go loud, in the time it takes to do 1 silent run. So yeah, easier to just blow them all to hell.
Overall, it's pretty decent. The religious stuff is back, now that I'm dealing with the Edeners (the remnants of the cult from FC 5), but it's nowhere near as obnoxious. I mean, it still is incredibly annoying religious bullshit, but it's not the central plot element, so it's only popping up now and then, so it's tolerable. I still find it really annoying that nobody actually provides counterpoint to the Edeners rhetoric. They just babble their insane religious nonsense, and if anyone outside the faith is even coded to react to the words, they just say things like "You're crazy!' and nothing else. So you don't see anyone countering with logic, reason, skepticism. It's just "blah blah blah god" "You're nuts" "only the unfaithful would say we are nuts!" "You're crazy!" "Is it crazy to see god's plan?!" and so on. Of course, with a silent protagonist, I just sit there and listen to all of it. Which, irks me.
Still, I'm enjoying it. I'm currently running around doing radiant missions to get Perk points, to upgrade my punching to god tier status, and then going to go punch the twins to death.
Oh, the music from Twin Gang, is some of the most obnoxious rap/hiphop I've ever heard, so much so that I think they did it on purpose. To find the most ear bleeding, poorly written, tonally grating stuff out there, and make them listen to it non-stop. There are multiple songs, where the rapper is "rhyming" using the same word.....over...and over. Like, rhyming Me with......me. Four verses in a row. "You know that you can't handle me." then rhymed with "Everyone out there can't handle me." To be followed up with the brilliant. "All of you trying to take from me!" And capped off with something like "Pretty soon you all gonna work for me!" So...yeah, that's a thing. I admit I'm not a fan of rap/hiphop as a genre in the first place, but I can appreciate the individual songs that are really good. These.....these are not.
There was like ONE song out of their track list that I found, not just tolerable, but actually somewhat pleasant to listen to.
The rest of the soundtrack, like the menu/map/options music, sounds straight out of Blood Dragon. And that I am most happy with, as I am a sucker for synthwave.