Blood Dragon

I finished playing Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon in it’s entirety, including all Achievements and collectables. The game itself is pretty short without much re-playability. That being said: It’s awesome. It’s like the 80’s exploded. It’s filled with references like Ninja Turtles, Krull, Star Wars and Terminator. Everything is neon, which is the way things should be. It even feels like Skyrim at times when you’re fighting giant dragons. Instead of CGI cutscenes, the game uses rertro-80’s style 16-Bit cutscences full of one-liners and Rocky-esque montages. There’s cheese-ball jokes like:

“Tell my wife I died a hero.”

“Tell her yourself!”

The game is very self-aware of itself as a game. The training sessions and the load-screen hints are parodies while being helpful. Your character, Rex, will even reference other, terrible missions from other games while basically doing the same thing in his. Him saying, “I hope I don’t have to collect any fucking flags,” while collecting TV sets of VHS tapes is likely a reference to the Assassin’s Creed side-mission where you have to spend hours and days collecting flags to get a pointless Achievement. Rex’s top running speed, the availability of vehicles and fast travel, plus his Cyber-eye that pings targets and the ability to unlock all collectible locations on the world map makes his collectible quest painless and easy.

Rex is able to finish quests to upgrade and trade-out his weapons. This becomes moot once you get the Killstar, a reference to the mystical weapon in the terrible 80’s movie, Krull. It’s basically a spinning Ninja Star that shoots out lasers from your cyber-arm. It’s uses your health-bar as ammo, but once you max out your level you won’t notice your health taking a hit. It can kill anything and even score head-shots with sweeping laser blasts. I spent hours just running around shooting anything that moved. This was a complete departure from how I started off in the game sneaking around getting Stealth kills. Stealth is only important if you don’t have the guns to back up a frontal assault.

The game’s ending had once of the greatest moments I’ve ever seen in a game, when you walk into a room and the floor lights up with a rainbow bridge to lead you to your new cyber-dragon-thing, which is basically a dinosaur with a giant cannon on it’s back you ride around on and kill things on-rails. This leads you to the end-game moment, which skips the obligatory boss battle.

Some areas are difficult, though, like when you have to kill two dragons at once in an arena-style fight to progress the game. They even have extra baddies come in to shoot you while you’re fighting for your life. I had to stealth the first part of the fight to set up mine and C4 traps (the only part of the game I used either weapon, despite the ready availability of both throughout), then blast away with the gattling gun and hope I didn’t have to reload.

I haven’t even played Far Cry 3, and I have no idea how similar the two games are, or if they’d even play the same. I know both are vaguely RPG, open-world-style FPS, but then Far Cry 3 probably doesn’t have a button for flipping people off.