New Dawn is basically Far Cry 5+Far Cry Primal+Far Cry Instincts. So if you've had your fill of Far Cry 5, then probably hold off for a while. This is very much FC5: What Happens Next. But the game is different under the hood. It's FC5 with an actual progression curve. It's FC5 without forced abductions. (A major, major, major core design complaint from FC5.) It's FC5 with a fundamental shift towards crafting and resource gathering. In FC5, hunting was completely useless. Perhaps intentionally so. In New Dawn, much of what you do exploring the world is in service of gathering resources. The structure of the game is oriented around building a community, much like Primal. You gather people from around the world, and gather resources. The progression of the plot is gated behind this rebuilding.
The Expeditions provide a change of scenery. There's five of them, and they consist of a fairly large area where you gather resources, find the package, and exfil. You can do each one repeatedly and they get more difficult each time. This shift in locale is a breath of fresh air. I find myself pining for an entire Far Cry game set in Arizona.
Then there's the Far Cry Instincts connection. And I kinda feel like making a thread about this at some point, because a lot of people seem genuinely unaware. Possibly because basically nobody in the modern Far Cry fanbase played Instincts. (Just picture me shaking my fist in indignation.) Also it's not mentioned in any of the game's marketing, possibly because it's kind of a mild spoiler.
It kinda feels weird to treat it as a spoiler. It's kinda like treating the fact Crysis has a nanosuit as a spoiler. Or that Jack Carver gets injected with a strange serum designed to allow him to access long-lost animalistic abilities in FC: Instincts as a spoiler. Long story short, once you unlock the "Gift", the gameplay does change to be closer to Instincts. You can now double jump. Throwing baseball bats at people's heads hurts them. But throwing baseball bats at people's heads with a snarling fury hurts them... uh... significantly more, to put it mildly. Also you can cloak, because, well, Crysis did it.
New Dawn becomes a game where you can deploy your wingsuit on a gentle slope, thanks to double jumping, then drop down onto a group of enemies and punch the shit out of them. Flamethrower enemies? Simply leap over the heads to land behind them. There are some checks and balances in place. Melee isn't as ludicrously overpowered as it was in Instincts, and you can't just grab people like you could in Crysis. But this is basically the closest thing to both Instincts and Crysis I've seen in a long time.
I kinda wonder if New Dawn should have put more focus on this part of the game. Used it in marketing. New Dawn didn't have a specific mechanical hook to explain to people how it differed from FC5. Primal had "no guns". Maybe they should have introduced the abilities earlier in the story. (Although they do kinda screw up the progression curve a bit.) Some decent environmental destruction wouldn't go amiss, either. It's been missing from Ubi FC games since FC2. Without the environmental destruction it feels much closer to Instincts than Crysis. But the extremely high mobility is closer to Crysis than Instincts.