[Ph!GR] Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon

Blood Dragon

Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon is pretty good…

But it’s pretty short. Once you actually focus on completing the main story it should only take you around 6 hours which is a fair time considering the game is only 15 of your American capitalist dollars… Sorry, channelled my inner-Grunch for a second there. Plus there’s a crap load of bonus stuff to do that will at least double the time it takes to actually finish the game. What I did was conquer all the garrisons first and then blaze through the main storyline. Which ends just as quickly as it starts.  But none of that is bad.

You play as Sergeant Rex Power Colt. (Yes, that is his name. And yes it is awesome.) Rex is a Mark IV (That’s 4… in case you’re uneducated.) cyber-soldier. I don’t know how he became a cyber-soldier or how any of it works, but hey, it’s pretty cool. Rex is sent to some island after fighting in The Vietnam War 2. Rex is accompanied by Spider, a wise-cracking, obviously stereotypical black man who serves no other purpose than being black and dying in the first fifteen minutes of the game. So, there are bad guys on the island and the island is home to some glowing dragons that can shoot lasers out of their eyes. It’s Rex’s job to kill the bad guy and save the girl, while staving off dragons. It’s your standard 80s si-fi movie affair. Which is literally the entire joke of the game.  Rex spouts off more one-liners than you can shake a stick at, there are neon lights everywhere and the music… the music just makes me giddy. As a kid who totally wasn’t born in the middle of the 90s and definitely remembered said decade, I can say that the 80s gives me nostalgia… Ok, that didn’t make as much sense as I had hoped.

So, what makes Blood Dragon so good? Well, there’s a heap of things. One-liners, the setting, the loading screen tips, the fact that it’s a much faster version of Far Cry 3, the reloading animations, flipping off people on command, fighting dragons, and that they took out all the extra stuff that hindered Far Cry 3, like collecting 150 relics or picking from a bunch of useless skills that you’ll probably never get the chance to use or you’ll use once and then forget. The tatau was pretty cool though. The basic idea of the skills in Blood Dragon is that once you level up, you’ll automatically acquire a pre-determined skill. This is nice but unfortunately, it’s very easy to miss the fact that you leveled up and without actively searching through the menu. So you could have gotten an automatic kill everyone skill three levels back without actually realizing it. I mean, there is a weapon that does that, you get it before the last level. And because I’m an idiot I already completed everything in the game before even touching the main story, so I missed out on using a death laser with nearly infinite ammo… Also, the last level lets you do a really cool thing that made me giggle uncontrollably. But you’ll get no spoilers from me.

Of course there are things that are bad about Blood Dragon. For one, there’s a sex scene thrown in the middle of Rex’s training montage. That’ll make it awkward to play in front of your mom. (Sorry, mom.) The game is far too short, I got close 100% completion in around 7 hours. (I can’t figure out how I’m supposed to headshot every type of enemy. I figured I had already done that.) Also, there’s no day light cycle, which I guess sets the stage, but it’s kind of depressing. During the day the sky is dark red and at night the sky is dark purple. Something barely noticeable. And this last one is kind of not really anything at all. Sometimes Rex just sounds like some old guy trying to be tough and failing miserably, but other times when he’s spouting certain one-liners, the stars align and it just sounds super right, like he was delivering the perfect end-all one-liner every action hero tries to accomplish. (personally, they should have gone with someone far cooler to do the voice. Like Liam Neeson!)  

On a scale from Far Cry 3 to Blood Dragons. Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon gets a Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon.

 

 

 

 

Wait… What?

2 responses on “[Ph!GR] Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon

  1. aregularcupofjo

    I need to get up to date on my gaming. I’m still stuck in the time of the N64 and PS2. How do I get games like Blood Dragon? And how can I find out about other great add ons like it?

    1. Phantum Fish

      Well. I would suggest buying it on Steam (for the PC) or Xbox Live Arcade if you’re using the 360 or the PlayStation Network for the PS3. It shouldn’t be too hard to find, it’s relatively new.

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