The difference with Blood Dragon is that it all happens at a faster clip. As with Far Cry 3, you can still use stealth to take down enemies and disable alarms, or you can just start shooting. The game is still largely about raiding enemy compounds, venturing on side missions and wasting time on the island looking for trinkets and hunting (cyber) wildlife. Mechanically, Blood Dragon doesn’t stray far from the source material. (At the start, Ubisoft’s logo warbles out of tune as it spins onto the screen, and a “tracking” bar appears during load times to adjust the picture.) Even the characters are tuned into the nostalgia the game’s villain is bent on reverting humanity to a more savage state, which seems like a gussied up way of saying he wants his ’80s movies back. The game itself is presented as an artifact from the VHS era that imagines “the future” as a neon-soaked 2007.
Basically, it’s like modern video games, except Blood Dragon is aware of its silliness.
Tired cliches, cringeworthy double entendres and references to decades-old pop culture saturate every line of dialog. The protagonist, Sergeant Rex Power Colt, is a gravel-voiced cyborg with a metallic arm and glowing red eye. Blood Dragon is a throwback the testosterone-driven films of the ’80s and early ’90s, before we demanded deep thoughts out of our action movies.
