Geek Blight

The story is a humorous homage to the 1980s, taking place in a futuristic 2007. You play as Rex Power Colt, a cybercommando whose target becomes killing Colonel Sloan, a rogue elite soldier who plans to destroy the world. In my opinion, nothing’s better than watching the launch trailer.

While I haven’t played Far Cry 3 yet, I get the impression gameplay is similar. The game is short, being a cheap standalone expansion, but if you go for finding everything, it still provides a lot of entertainment and a great value for the price. Most of the gameplay takes place in an open-world island with a few passages related to the main story taking place in separate buildings or underground bases. I think it’s a rock-solid shooter and its sense of humor about the 1980s, games in general and itself make it very enjoyable. The tutorial section and loading screen tips are just brilliant.

You can drive vehicles, swim, jump very high, you don’t take fall damage, you can glide, ride zip lines and take both stealth and frontal approaches as you see fit.

I hadn’t played Far Cry 3 yet as I didn’t know if the game would run well on my system, but after playing Blood Dragon, which lets you peek into both the gameplay and technical aspects of standard Far Cry 3, I’m eager to give the original game a try.

Blood Dragon itself is very solid. The atmosphere totally fits the game and the graphics are memorable, as are the comic-like pixelated cutscenes. In the sound department, the laser and weapon sounds, character voices (Rex Power Colt being voiced by Michael Biehn) and music are superb.

I missed mentioning a couple of faults when I posted the review yesterday. On the gameplay side, I bit the bullet and played in hard mode from the start, and still found the game easy in general. I thought the same about Dishonored, but didn’t find time to review it.

On the technical side, the game uses Uplay and requires creating an account on that system. As I mentioned in the Max Payne 3 review regarding Rockstar Social Club, I think this type of software is more of a liability than a virtue. It updated itself every couple of days. The download was quite big, and my connection speed was never maximized. This adds 30-60 seconds to the load time every time you want to play, again without providing any added value whatsoever.

For its price: highly recommended. I wouldn’t skip it.