Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon

Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon is a standalone expansion to Ubisoft’s popular open world shooter, Far Cry 3.  The engine and a few mechanics are the same, but this is fundamentally a different game, so for the rest of the review I will refer to it as simply Blood Dragon.

The central structural and artistic gimmick of Blood Dragon is that it’s the logical extension of the future as presented by 80s action movies, the central conceit being that this is the actualization of the archetypal futuristic action movie of the 80s.  Think Commando meets Terminator in a dark alley with Total Recall, except it’s all a video game made by the Far Cry 3 Team.

There’s a lot to like here, most of which is the same collection of mechanics that worked well in Far Cry 3’s base game.  Similarly, there are a few moments when the satirical, over-the-top humor really works.  Nonetheless, Blood Dragon’s biggest problems come in by the same avenues.  The smaller size and scope of the standalone DLC leaves the vast expanse of Far Cry 3 to be desired, and the points at which what apparently passes for humor do not work outnumber the moments where it does by far.

Dragging Bloodily

One of Blood Dragon’s biggest problems becomes apparent in the first moments the game loads up.

Where Far Cry 3 presented the now-standard cutscene in a strictly first person experience and thereby presented a new level of immersion to the player, Blood Dragon opts for a callback to 80s games, presenting any and all cutscene material in the pane-by-pane, pixelated style that was common in the era it’s imitating.  At first, this is endearing and even carries a little bit of its own humor, but eventually it comes to simply be a shame.  Frame-by-frame pixelated scenes look like shit compared to the rest of the game, and it breaks any of the dramatic immersion and the narrative tension that Blood Dragon has.  In another game, this might not be such a big issue, but in keeping with the nature of 80s action movies it loves, there’s hardly any dramatic immersion or narrative tension to begin with.  What the developers seem to have forgotten is that in an overblown action movie the style and presentation of the paltry few dramatic moments is what was supposed to make up for the lack of real dramatic motion in the plot.

This is most disappointing at the game’s predictable climax, in which the central villain is killed in a pixelized cutscene that’s poorly executed to boot.  This terribly poor creative decision robs an already poor experience of what little heart it already had.

In cooperation with the 80s action movie feel, one would think that the gameplay would be overblown and ridiculous.  But frankly, it’s not.  At least, no more than Far Cry 3 was.  There are crazy neon colors, your knife is glowing blue and you throw shurikens instead of your knife, but it’s just more Far Cry 3 with neon colors everywhere.  You run around a lot, you do some sneaking, and when the sneaking breaks down you use all of your explosives and stand atop a hill of corpses.  Maybe it says something about gaming culture that that’s what passes for boring in modern gaming, but choosing to parody 80s action movies sets a certain standard that Blood Dragon fails to reach.

While we’re on the topic of the neon aesthetic, I have to say that after about 10 minutes it becomes tired.  Far Cry 3 had a jungle full of vibrant greens, dark browns and a bright, blue sky.  The island in Blood Dragon is a blackish gray.  So is the sky.  Bright pillars of red or green mark the garrison bases, while guns and enemies and explosive barrels glow bright green and bright blue and bright red, but again it’s just boring once you’ve been around it for a few minutes.

Really, that’s the central problem with Blood Dragon as a whole.  Shooting a laser gun is really cool, for about five minutes.  A self aware, satirical sense of humor is fun, but only in the same way salt is tasty, too much and the experience is spoiled.  This is a game full of ideas that sound really great, but the repetition and familiarity necessary to an open world game makes all of these cool ideas boring after a few minutes.

The only things that Blood Dragon does treat as special are it’s 2 rail-shooter segments, one at the start and one at the end.  The first is a nice, well-executed homage to Predator, but the second, which supposedly serves as the grand finale of the whole over-the-top experience, feels pathetic.  If anything, in such an overblown satire the end seems way too self aware to be any fun, and it ends up (believe it or not) feeling like it takes itself too seriously.

While we’re here, I’d like to comment on how much I hate rail shooter segments.  A number of modern games like to use the rail shooter segment as a kind of narrative focal point to create a feeling of desperate violence while moving along a carefully constructed experience (Spec Ops, Far Cry 3, Call of Duty: X where x is a real number, etc) but as a player I would like to say that they’re simply not fun.  This is one of the few things that the Halo series always gets right: I don’t want to ride a helicopter or a neon dinosaur or a gun truck, even if I get to shoot a kick-ass gun while I’m doing it, I want to control the helicopter or the neon dinosaur or the gun truck.

The Verdict: No thumbs at all

I really wanted to love everything about this game, but in the end it just feels cheap and put together just a little too quickly for it’s own good.  I can recognize that this is a kind of satirical labor of love on the part of a team that made a great, grim and serious game, and I want to forgive them for the faults herein.  Nonetheless, the game ends up being variously boring, tedious, and disappointing too often to get a recommendation.  Still, there’s some decent execution here, and anyone who liked Far Cry 3 is likely to enjoy 13 more bases to sneak in and overtake.