Previews// Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon

“The year is 2007. It is the future.” That, right there, should give you an indication as to how bonkers Ubisoft’s Far Cry 3 expansion is. Titled Blood Dragon, it’s a tongue-in-cheek throwback to cheesy 1980s action and cyberpunk flicks. Cyborg wars, macho dialogue and colossal dinosaurs that shoot laser beams. They all feature here.

Ubisoft likens the ‘extreme’ nature of the neon-drenched gameplay to that of Rambo 3 or The Terminator. The plot? A nuclear war has engulfed the planet, which was quickly followed up by an invasion by a rogue cyborg army. To put it in the game’s terms: The apocalypse has been hit by an apocalypse.

Countering these new threats requires a bionic evolution of mankind. Enter the Mark IV cyborg supersoldiers, a legion of human commandos that spend their time gunning down walking tin cans. The top performer in this defence force is you - a hero named Sergeant Rex Power Colt, hilariously acted by Michael ‘Kyle Reese’ Biehn of The Terminator fame. He sounds so incredibly old and creaky as he delivers a string of hammy one-liners (headshot an enemy, and you hear ‘He got ahead of himself’), but it still works.

Your comrade is a ninja commando named Spider - clearly inspired by crap US ninja flicks (he’s a black dude, cracking wise every five seconds with a Japanese bandana wrapped around his head) and Sub Zero from Mortal Kombat. The two trade macho lines and beefcake bravado - including ridiculous eighties-style exposition in the middle of a firefight - and Spider even plays a practical joke on Colt when he forces you to go through a purposefully arduous tutorial sequence.

As you would expect from an expansion of a AAA game, Blood Dragon largely relies on the backbone of the Far Cry 3 world and game mechanics - but with the efforts made in presentation you wouldn’t think you were playing in an alternate version of the Rook Islands. The once-striking green jungles and bright blue oceans are unrecognisable, in a landscape that has been dipped entirely in a neon colour coating.

It’s like walking around in a tropical version of a Reflect nightclub. Random environments are illuminated in purples, oranges and deep reds. Forcefields flash on the screen in shades of green, and the skies have been cast in darkness. While it all looks a bit like Cybertron, a pumping 1980s-inspired soundtrack from remix band Power Glove channels action flicks like Commando and TV shows like Thundercats in equal measure.

The retro presentation doesn’t stop there. Even the cutscenes are played out using 1980s sprites, almost as if you were sitting through a flashy NES game. I was almost expecting a Mega Man style “20XX” reference. But you do get Robocop references. A lot of them. And a “Winners Don’t Use Drugs” homage. Hell, even at the start of the game you mow down enemy cyborgs from a helicopter using a turret, to the theme of Little Richard’s Long Tall Sally - a throwback to Predator.

As for the gameplay itself - it’s slick. Certainly seems slicker than Far Cry 3, but that’s probably because a lot of the mechanics have been somewhat super-charged to accommodate the ridiculous cyborg power-ups. The Cyber-Eye allows you to spot faraway enemies, and tag them so that you can see their outline through walls and track their every movement. If you’re low on health and have no medpacks left, you can heal yourself (but you’ll be vulnerable for a few seconds).

Weapons such as the Fazertron, Kobracon and Galleria 1991 pack some serious punch. Which is just as well because the enemies you’ll be facing are quite tricky to put down. From snipers to shocktroopers and bulky mini-gun wielding strongborgs, you’ll likely run out of ammo fast if you’re not careful.

But there are other ways to successfully attack a large number of cyborg renegades. This is where this game’s name sake comes into play - the world is riddled with colossal dinosaurs called Blood Dragons. They feast on... well, human and cyborg blood, and these T-Rex style monsters are easily spotted by their glowing neon veins. They have crap eyesight, so you must creep around them - but you can’t kill them.

Instead, you can lure them to other foes using Cyberhearts (cyborg giblets that you can collect by wrenching them out of dead enemy corpses). Chuck these valuable commodities in the direction of, say, a cyborg outpost, and you’ll see these beasts blow up everyone in the area with freaking laserbeams fired from their freaking mouths.

Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon is so crazy and ridiculous that it might just work. We know about it already, thanks to a leaked gameplay video the other day, but it won’t be too long until we can get our hands on it - May 1st. Probably a sound idea, because the only downside to this game I can see is that the novelty of it all might wear off too quickly. With the game’s release right around the corner, it might just be the silly little spinoff that cures that itch for some 1980s machismo.