FarCry 3: Blood Dragon

[IamLEAM1983]

Shhh. The game's not out yet. Shh. It's been leaked into the Intertubes by Russian hackers and Ubisoft's ineptitude at coding DRM properly. So yeah. Nothing to read here. There's nothing below this point. Just, you know, pictures of cats. Cute cats, actually.

Yeah.

Do you remember the eighties? Because someone at Ubisoft Montreal clearly does. Bad fashion, neon colours, no acoustic instruments anywhere, Linda Hamilton with horrendously permed hair and Schwarzenegger with mid-long hair thanks to Conan The Barbarian shoots. Then short hair because the Terminator gets his ass broiled in a car explosion. Do you remember who played Kyle Reese in the first Terminator? Someone at Ubisoft Montreal does, and it was Michael Biehn.

Y'know, those eighties. I was born in 1983, so my record of the decade is generally fuzzy. My general consciousness more or less erupts out of Studio Toei's productions of Dennis the Menace and The Real Ghostbusters and out into the smorgasbord of awesome toy product placement which was the nineties - but I've had all the time in the world to go back and revisit the early years of my terrestrial existence. If there's one thing that sort of pops out, it's that we loved ourselves some macho shooty gun action. John Millius, John McTiernan, Paul Verhoeven - there's entire castes of directors who made a career out of framing dudes with guns shooting at other dudes with guns. Said dudes are usually shirtless, grizzled as fuck, and would make Coelasquid's Commander Badass give an absolute orgy of fist-pumps.

You want more movies? Fine. Predator, Commando, Cobra, the first two Die Hard flicks, practically anything with Cynthia Rothrock's name on it, Running Man, Total Recall, about one third of the Rocky flicks, fucking etc. Those eighties, right?

In recent years, we've moved away from super-virile reactionary types that feel like a right-winger's power fantasy and we've started exploring deep and complex types. Before Bale's Batman, however, we'd spend a little over ten years slugging it out through the concept of the really capable dude with lots of muscles who honestly doesn't give a shit. The alumni of the Snake Plissken School of Badassery. This is what Blood Dragon is drawing from, in a kind of comedic and reverent take on everything "eighties" in the sci-fi genre. All the same, it's as true a FarCry game as could be - only at a reduced play time and price.

The whole game is a badly distorted VHS tape. Loading segments are a black screen with the pictogram for auto-tracking being in the process of adjusting itself. As for the premise? It's suitably retro, as is the presentation.

The year is 2007. It is the future. Mankind's fucked itself up the bunghole with an abusive use of nuclear weapons, and the soldiers of the future are - you guessed it - cyborgs. You play as one such cyborg, Rex Power Colt. I'll let the sheer badassery of that name sink in for a second. Done? You're voiced by Michael Biehn, by the way. A Michael Biehn that seems to be trying real hard to parody his own Kyle Reese days, and it works hilariously well. Rex's design feels like someone threw Mortal Kombat's Kano and RoboCop together in a particle accelerator, complete with Colt's pistol looking suitably oversized. It's actually a machine pistol, too, so it fires in bursts. How is that not utterly eighties?

What's left of the free world is threatened by a turncoat by the name of Sloan, who's about to unleash something particularly nasty on the already beleaguered American masses. Your job is to stop him.

Pleasantly, this is actually what you'd call an "expandalone". It's basically a reskin of FarCry 3, but it comes in its own downloadable package. No big investment is required, which is sure to make purchase easier on some. In some ways, however, Blood Dragon is a return to previous game mechanics: Rex starts out with a full arsenal - I can't think of one eighties' badass that doesn't - the levelling mechanism is relegated to gated unlocks that occur without you needing much in the way of input, and you're very consciously designed to actually be a bullet sponge. This isn't the story of an untrained tourist going mad over a period of months and turning into a killing machine; you're already one at the onset. You're already strapped up the wazoo with grenades, firearms and ammunition. This is very much a game about shooting people for the sake of shooting people, if the paper-thin narrative is ignored.

Structurally, this is still the same game that released last winter. Rex's cyber-eye fills in for Jason's camera, and his collecting cyber-hearts from dead cyborgs subs in for the original's hunting system. This gives you cyber-points (there's a lot of cyber in this thing - oh God, that sounds awkward) that go towards you earning more cyborg-ish abilities. The difference rests in how Blood Dragon doesn't take itself seriously at all. Its pointlessly long tutorial segment is actually a joke aimed precisely at pointlessly long tutorial segments; and the loading screens' tips and tricks are usually so one-dimensional as to be comically unhelpful. The best one being "To look around, look around."

No duh. Thanks, game! There's several moments like this where Rex groans at the cruel stupidity of the situation he's in - and you snicker or at least chuckle at his expense. Remember the base game's grody Bear Grylls-ish healing animations? They're back, but rendered amusingly tame by the fact that you're a cyborg tugging and pushing at his own robot bits in the middle of a firefight. The firefights themselves are awash in laser light and all of the Terminator-worthy laser pew-pew-pew sounds you could think of. The enemies you shoot at all sound like CATS from All Your Base and Zero Wing fame. If I had to bring up a visual comparative, I'd mention Terminator 2's Future War segment, with its blue light, bright lasers, its own pew-pew-pew sounds and the general feeling that the whole thing feels like it comes from the darker, grittier side of Tron. That's Blood Dragon's completely macho lack of pathos in a nutshell, and it's hilariously awesome.

Not that there's not a few problems. In some places, the voice acting turns wooden in an intentional manner. That's awesome. Defending a computer-controlled ally while he's hacking a missile control station and shouting cliché hacking stereotypes just short of "Flushing the Intertubes!" is pretty fun; but the game tends to forget its own forbears' roots and locks you in indoors locations where you're more or less expected to defend the girl or protect your Black hacker homie yet again. Being able to mark and track your enemies loses its flair once you're all stuck in the same confined industrial space repeatedly. Then, of course, there's the occasional line that's just plain wooden, and not delivered for the sake of the lulz. I'm thrilled that they got Biehn on the project, but there's several instances where bad directing feels obvious, or where it becomes clear he wasn't giving much of a damn to it all. The aesthetics, while awesome, can sometimes get in the way of the shooting. Tracking flubs and grainy visuals all feel very appropriate, but there's an insane amount of post-processing at work here. As a result, BD feels a lot less optimized than its predecessor. It could be that I'm playing a version that's missing one month of development time, but I'd be surprised.

The long and short of it is best described by a commented on The Escapist, who likened it to someone dropping some Saints Row:The Third into his cup of perfectly serviceable commentary on insanity and the definition thereof. Despite some obvious flubs, the end result tastes surprisingly good.