Once the new group is added to the Ribbon:

1. Click the Highlight Changes command/button

2. Check the box that says Track changes while editing … and the box that says Highlight changes on screen. 

3. Click OK.

Now every change made to this spreadsheet is tracked and marked with a blue border and a tiny blue triangle (upper left corner), which appears in the edited cells. If you have multiple reviewers, they are each assigned a different color.

Move your cursor over an edited cell to see a popup summary of the tracked changes plus the author, date, and time of change. Note; however, that only the most recent/last change made displays in the summary.

JD Sartain / IDG Worldwide

Once the spreadsheet has circulated through all of the potential editors, it’s time to accept or reject the proposed changes.

1. Click Review at the top of the Ribbon menu and click the Accept/Reject Changes button.

2. Excel asks to Save the Workbook. Click OK.

3. Excel highlights the first cell that was edited on the spreadsheet and simultaneously displays the Select Changes to Accept or Reject dialog box.

4. All current changes are listed. Select the edited version you prefer (or choose the original version) from the list and click the Accept button. If none of the listed versions work, click the Reject button, and the cursor moves to the next edited cell.

5. If the change is universal (as in this case, because all the ampersands were changed to the word “and”), click the Accept All button. All the selected edits are accepted at once.

To turn off Track Changes, return to the Review group and go to the Track Changes group. Click the Highlight Changes button and uncheck the box that says: Track changes while editing …. 

JD Sartain / IDG Worldwide

Far Cry: New Dawn isn’t content with a nothing-story though, and that’s where it goes wrong. You thought the ending of Far Cry 5 was wild? Just wait until you get into the meat of New Dawn’s story, which revisits Joseph Seed and the New Eden cult in ways that defy explanation. And in ways that, frankly, I don’t know how to feel about. Like Far Cry 5, I finished New Dawn and just felt bewildered, like “What the hell did I just play?” bewildered.

And to some extent that’s refreshing, playing something weird and risqué—but it never really goes far enough to feel like Ubisoft’s in on the joke. New Dawn oscillates between wink-nod silliness and dead seriousness in a way that’s disorienting and even unsettling at times, and I came away feeling the same as I did last time: Ubisoft needs to choose. It either needs to go full Blood Dragon or full Far Cry 2 realism again, but this uncomfortable gray area between earnest and flippant is (at least for me) unsustainable.

Shake it up again

That said, New Dawn makes great strides around the edges of the story.

It’s the second major overhaul in as many years, given that Far Cry 5 already made quite a few changes to the old formula, i.e. having the player discover locations in a more organic way instead of littering the map with icons, adding light puzzle elements with “Treasure Hunts,” adding AI companions, and so on.

New Dawn is even more substantial, I think. The key to it all? Tiered loot. It’s a simpler system than Destiny or, in Ubisoft’s case, The Division and Assassin’s Creed. Those games all have complicated and granular gear systems with like, 350 different levels of knee pad armor or whatever. Far Cry’s version is just four tiers, and it only applies to guns.

But that’s four more tiers than Far Cry had before, and it makes a huge difference. In the past you basically (if you were like me) bought your favorite weapons two or three hours into the game, then used those same weapons for the next 20-odd hours with zero improvements or incentive to change. For me that always meant getting the bow and the silenced sniper rifle, then wiping outposts from the relative safety of a distant bush.

Far Cry: New Dawn still reaches that point eventually, but it takes a few more hours. You start your journey into Hope County restricted to the lowest tier of guns, most of which are like “Rusty Shotgun,” “Rusty Pistol,” and so on. Damage is low, stability is even lower, and most have junk iron sights or other significant drawbacks. Only one or two weapons are viable for stealth kills, and none of them are distance weapons. Worse, a Tier 1 weapon does barely any damage to Tier 2 enemies. To take them out effectively you’ll need Tier 2 weapons.

IDG / Hayden Dingman

Gaining access to the next tier requires upgrading your base’s weapons workshop. Upgrading your weapon’s workshop requires ethanol. Attaining ethanol requires conquering outposts. Conquering the more difficult outposts means getting better weapons. See the feedback loop?

So anyway, you go out and conquer two or three outposts and upgrade your workshop. Then, because this is the post-apocalypse, you need to craft better weapons. This requires scouring the world for springs, gears, and other bits and bobs. They’re all pretty easy to find, and by the end of the game I had a comically large surplus, but it’s one more layer of friction between you and a better arsenal.

This loop runs two more times, as you eventually upgrade to Tier 3 and finally Tier 4 weapons, each time doing more damage, getting access to better scopes and silencers and so on. It takes a while though, and in the meantime you might actually use a couple of guns you might otherwise avoid. I used shotguns a lot in New Dawn, because even a lower-tier shotgun could still do decent damage to a higher-tier enemy. And every few hours I got new (and often better-looking) weapons, which made me feel like I’d progressed more than I ever did in Far Cry 5.

IDG / Hayden Dingman

And you’re not just upgrading weapons. You’re upgrading an entire base, the town of Prosperity. Upgrading your infirmary grants a health bonus, your garage adds better vehicles, your helipad allows fast travel, and so on. All this requires ethanol as well, and eventually you’ll need to “Ransom” your outposts—trade them back to the enemy, who populates the outpost with more and better soldiers. Conquer them again and you’ll get more ethanol, with each outpost featuring three increasingly difficult setups. It’s a cool idea, one that makes outposts a lot more interesting (and a little more challenging) than they’ve been in the past, and adds a good chunk of time onto what’s otherwise a fairly tight, 10 to 15 hour game.

Even better are the Expeditions though. These are basically super-outposts, custom maps built around U.S. landmarks and populated by a ton of enemies. Your goal is to get in, grab a package, and then wait for the helicopter to extract you and your partner while waves of enemies descend on your position. It’s the most exciting Far Cry’s felt to me in a long while, manning a gun emplacement outside Alcatraz or a deserted Louisiana amusement park while keeping an eye on the extraction timer. And it’s also the best part of New Dawn’s post-apocalypse, enormous set pieces that are way more eye-catching and memorable than anything in Hope County.

Bottom line

Great changes, all told. Far Cry: New Dawn is surprisingly satisfying to play, and enticed me to explore outside the bounds of the main story more than its predecessors ever did. Between the Treasure Hunts, the Expeditions, the reworked outposts and weapons systems, a hypothetical Far Cry 6 is working from a solid blueprint.

But the stories just aren’t working for me. New Dawn at least feels less irresponsible than its predecessor, if only because its subject matter is less politically charged. Still, there’s no overarching identity here, no cohesion to it. One second you’re listening to a serious sermon about purifying your soul to create a New Eden, the next you’re participating in a demolition derby and fishing a gun out of a poop-filled toilet. It feels like two different games mashed together, and with every new Far Cry outing that tension gets worse.

As I said in our preview a few weeks ago, that can be somewhat refreshing at times. Crackdown 3’s still unique, in that its open-world is really an open-world. The entire setup is nonlinear, meaning you can take a crack at the final boss as soon as you start the game. You probably won’t succeed, but you can try. That’s an idea that deserved to be resurrected from 2007. It wouldn’t work for every game, but it works here, and more importantly it’s interesting.

So much of Crackdown 3 is not interesting at all. Fully 90 percent of it is jumping around the city doing busywork. Sometimes you’re freeing prisoners, other times you’re blowing up fuel refineries, other times you’re taking over monorail stations. Inevitably it just means “Go to a location and kill everything until one of your two chatty boss-narrators congratulates you and says you killed enough.” Scrub one more icon from your map.

Do these activities enough (each repeats about a dozen times), and you’ll open up a boss battle. That’s the other 10 percent of the game, and it’s just as generic. Hell, at least three out of the nine boss battles are mechs, literally indistinguishable from each other except for the weapons they use. The final boss is the most visually interesting, but that one was undermined by the fact I found a platform where I could literally stand in place and shoot rockets at it until it died its inglorious death. Hell yeah. Roll credits.

Here’s the thing: Crackdown 3’s not even bad! Bad implies you hate something, or have a strong emotional response to it. Crackdown 3 just exists, which is worse in a way. I’ve played and reviewed a lot of games in my life. Generally, even the terrible games, you can see what the developers hoped to achieve. They didn’t, and that’s always sad, that unrealized potential—but you know why a game got made, what spark of an idea led to its creation. Honestly I think of that as part of my job, writing reviews. Anyone can point out whether a game is bad. More interesting is pinning down a developer’s goals, an idealized version of the experience, and then discussing where execution didn’t match ambition.

As Crackdown 3’s credits rolled though, I realized I still didn’t know what those ambitions were. Like, was it the backend cloud technology—now limited to the tacked-on multiplayer modes—that drove Crackdown 3’s development? Does someone high up at Microsoft just really love Crackdown? Because what we have here isn’t terrible, not in a product sense. It functions as advertised. Performance is great. The art direction for the city of New Providence can be stunning, at times. Terry frickin’ Crews is in it, even if he only speaks for about three minutes in the opening cutscene and then never, ever again.

Regardless, it passes in a blur and then it’s gone. Nothing about Crackdown 3 stands out. It doesn’t break new ground, nor does it seem like it even wants to. Microsoft could’ve just remastered the original Crackdown, put it on the PC and the Xbox One, and it would’ve fulfilled the exact same purpose without taking seven years to develop.

And then Crackdown 3 has the audacity to tease a sequel at the end!

IDG / Hayden Dingman

I just don’t understand it. I don’t want to make light of the work that’s gone into Crackdown 3. It’s clearly been a hellish process getting this game out the door. But I don’t understand what the goal was here, or why Crackdown 3 was allowed to see the light of day while so many other Xbox One projects were killed off before release this generation.

There is that multiplayer mode, of course—a showcase for Microsoft’s cloud-based destruction tech. And hey, that tech is cool. Maybe five or ten years down the line it’ll change how games are developed, or how they’re run on the player’s end at least. But if that’s the sole reason for Crackdown 3’s existence, a proof-of-concept for a dream Microsoft pitched more than five years ago, it seems criminal to have that shunted into a tacked-on multiplayer mode I can’t imagine most people play past the first few rounds. Like so much of Crackdown 3, it feels generic and perfunctory and dated, destruction tech be damned. I hope Microsoft can find a better use for those dreams in a more interesting context, maybe on the next hardware generation.

Bottom line

Crackdown 3 is the perfect capstone for the Xbox One in a lot of ways. Oh sure, the generation’s not over yet—we’ll get another Forza or two before the changeover, maybe a Gears of War. But you have to imagine Microsoft’s focus is on the future at this point. The Xbox One entered this generation on the back foot, and while Microsoft’s laid a lot of groundwork for better days to come it’s spent most of the last six years looking kind of lost, playing it safe when it should’ve taken more risks and placing bets that never quite panned out.

And Crackdown 3 might very well be the last of those legacy bets, a confusing end to a confusing era for Microsoft. We can hope, at least.