Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon Review

The 80s was a time of…well…I was a foetus for the closing months of the decade so I don’t feel like I have the relevant qualifications to reminisce here. If DVD archives are anything to go by, it was a time of high octane action and badass one-liners coated in a VHS filter. It’s a decade even my younger self lamented with hilarity as ‘The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air’ blew anything the era created out of the water…

…anyway, it’s good to see that I’m not the only one who finds its ridiculousness funny. Ubisoft are on my side, re-painting a whole island in the name of satire in Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon.

The year is 2007…in the year 198X, and the planet has been ravaged by a nuclear apocalypse layered with another nuclear apocalypse. The new world has dawned cybersoldiers, all of questionable morality. The ‘good’ follow the likes of the unquestionable badass Rex Power Colt, a man who will stop at pretty much nothing for revenge and the taste of blood. The ‘bad’ consist of Sloan, a degenerate psychopath attempting to reset the world to prehistoric origins with the help of good old-fashioned ‘nuclear warfare’. Motives and alignments aside, both are renegades of the highest calibre, and Rex certainly doesn’t want to live in a world coated in radiation…in fact he sticks his middle finger up and impales anyone who stands in his way with it thanks to the threat.

Blood Dragon does everything in its power in the first 5 minutes to smack you in the face with montage after montage after pixellated, power ballad fuelled, cheese spewing montage. Navigating through the main story, Rex fires off one-liners left right and center like they’re-quite rightly-going out of style. It’s obnoxious, it’s naff and unashamedly hilarious. Parody reeks from every orifice of the world and decides to never let up. It’s clear those who put their creative minds behind this guffawed as hard as you will when such jokes are delivered for the first time.

Just like its predecessor, Blood Dragon awards those who face danger head on with an adrenaline fix. Hopping on minions to knife their heads, spewing bullets at anyone who dares try to protect the helpless cretins you’re taking down whilst watching your experience grow higher never tires. Completing secondary objectives gives you attachments to clip onto your weapons and completing main missions usually puts you behind the wheel of obnoxiously high power massacre machines. Decimate a wave of cretins, slay a laser imbued super dinosaur, rinse and repeat. The process barely changes. The amusement of such events doesn’t either.

There’s a spoilt little brat in me somewhere that isn’t entirely happy with the structure of Blood Dragon though. A little brat that’s coated in nits that still need picking. Scanning the map and noticing the vast array of bases to overcome and collectables to nab, my heart initially fluttered. It was impossible to play the original without investing a plethora of lifetimes investigating each and every facet of the island given to you. Here however, you only need to dabble in island life to get the most out of it. As the last trophy pinged on my screen, I noticed my play time clocked in at 5 and a half hours. A couple of hours less, and I’d be calling this the greatest film parody of all time.

With flashbacks of Rook Island gracing my retinas as I played, I found it incredibly difficult to warm to Blood Dragon’s art style. Bases and facilities have a great retro-future vibe to them, but set out across the vast plains of the environment for too long, and everything begins to look remarkably similar. The game doesn’t look bad, but when traversing the island for anything beyond 2 minutes, you find nothing pops out. The maroon of the sky merges with the maroon of the Earth effortlessly, and should you tackle a bunch of secondary missions on the outside of the more creative bases, there’s a constant danger of the game becoming a grind…until you’re given the opportunity to take down a Blood Dragon with a mini gun. Then things tend to work in its favour.

Don’t jump into Blood Dragon expecting an experience as deep as Far Cry 3. As it’s a stand-alone expansion, that should sound obvious, but it’s hard to forget just how expansive [i]Blood Dragon’s[/i] forerunner was. Crafting is nowhere to be seen and the experience system has been streamlined into a more linear upgrade path. The statistic driven will be bothered, but if you’re still disappointed after being handed sniper rifle with bullets that explode on impact and fire-imbued shotguns, then you need to get your priorities straight.

Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon is farcical flippant fun stuffed with so many laminations it’s practically vomiting neon in your face with absolutely no shame. With a small variety of missions and not many hours behind it, it can’t escape the fact that it feels like a prologue for bigger things to come. That handful of hours , however, is a blast from the past while it lasts, filled to the brim with exploding bullets, ray blasting gargantuan lizards and pixellated montages. It may not last all that long, but you’re guaranteed to have a rollicking good time throughout, even if you’re a young ‘un who didn’t even know there were years before the 90s.