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After years spent relegated to backlog limbo, I've finally found time to start Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon. The title card has been hard to ignore in all its pink, blue, and neon purple glory, as were promises of corny '80s hero one-liners from the "part man, part machine, all cyber commando" protagonist I've seen and read so much about. But as a latecomer to the Ubisoft action-FPS series, my only excuse is that I simply missed the boat back in 2013.
I'm also habitually wary of any shooter gunplay from the pre-Xbox One era (though gritting my teeth through Mass Effect 1 last year was more than worth the jank) thanks to being a little spoiled by modern tech. Pair that with the glut of stunning new games I've been digging into this year, and my reasons for snubbing this cult classic are plain.
Article continues below"Disgusting. I love it."
After being bullied by the difficulty selection menu – easy mode is for "sidekicks playing at action hero," don't you know? – I find myself in a helicopter, machine gun in hand. I should have seen it coming. Of course Blood Dragon starts in the thick of the action, in keeping with the best Far Cry games of its ilk.
Enemies relentlessly return fire, their telltale red auras scattered over rooftops and hovering nearby in their own aircraft, but they are no match for the hell Rex is raining down on them as I squeeze the trigger. Having an on-rails FPS segment to kick off a retro sci-fi game is gloriously apt, and as I struggle against the (predictably) clunky weight of my weapon, it feels like a promising taste of what's to come.
Everything is dripping in quintessentially '80s camp; the music is so much fun I almost forget to hit the continue button, the over-the-top narrator feeds me all the action hero backstory I can stomach, and all I can do is settle down and get comfy. It's going to be one frenetic adventure, that's for sure.
After the bombastic, hands-on intro, I'm treated to a series of old-school pixel stills instead of fully animated cutscenes to introduce the next task. My mission seems simple: break into an enemy encampment, meet up with an ally named Spider, and hack into the mainframe. Honestly, it sounds eerily similar to Johnny Silverhand's big Arasaka Tower siege in Cyberpunk 2077.
But first, tutorials. If I'd any concern that Rex wouldn't be that relatable of a protagonist, what with being a cyborg-human soldier hybrid sporting an x-ray eyeball and all, they fade fast when Rex grumbles about the annoyances of tutorial pop-ups.
There are a lot of them, all of them satirical. One informs me of the genius of looking around, another explains crouching as engaging my muscles to bring myself lower to the ground, and the very first tells me to press A on my controller to indicate my ability to read. "Just let me kill, people, dammit," Rex groans after my fourth or fifth pop-up. Same, buddy. Same.
It's a neat little touch. Everything about this game feels tongue-in-cheek, deliberately cheesy and overstated to poke fun at both the stylized '80s vibes and the more dull, formulaic aspects of video gaming itself.
Rock n rolla
Sometimes Blood Dragon feels like it can't decide what to parody first.
Once I hammer my way through the last of the pop-up tips and get the hang of stealth, I'm finally at the mission zone.
As per my lessons from the heavily tutorialized intro, I sneak up on an unsuspecting enemy and perform a takedown using the right joystick before pivoting, locking onto another, and hitting the right trigger to throw a shuriken for a chain-kill. Rex drops another casual one-liner. I giggle despite myself. We press on into the arena.
Here is where things get messy. I'm instructed to disable the alarm system to prevent reinforcements, something easy enough to pull off given the lack of enemies on the whole left side of the map. But for the life of me, I cannot work out how to stealth-kill my way through all the enemies on the right side.
There's a sniper high on a tower facing out into the facility, so if I try to pull off a stealth takedown, he's bound to see it. He's also much tricker to gun down than the other lackeys, courtesy of my extremely slow and loud sniper rifle, so I decide that putting a bullet in him first is worth making the rest of the outpost hostile to at least get his pesky red dot off my chest.
As I suspected, Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon's gunplay is very much of its time, even with this being the enhanced 2021 edition. Aim assist makes strafing slow and slugging, so I immediately turn that off, and the lengthy reload, looting, and weapon change animations have me clenching my jaw painfully. Yet still, I'm having a blast. Something about Blood Dragon's tone is uniquely weird, and I absolutely adore it.
There's no telling how long Blood Dragon will be on Game Pass, along with its Ubisoft Classics cohort of the best Assassin's Creed games and other Far Cry titles, but I'm already locked in. There are so many quirks and oddities, sometimes Blood Dragon feels like it can't decide what to parody first. One moment, I'm ripping out blue cyber hearts from the corpses of my foes (very metal), and the next, I'm distracting them with a tabletop die (not very metal). It's charmingly bizarre in the best way possible, and it's reminded me why I fell in love with Ubisoft to begin with.
Check out all the upcoming Ubisoft games on the horizon. Spoiler: there aren't an awful lot, bar Assassin's Creed Codename Hexe...
