What year is it again?Īlmost as soon as Colt hits the ground he breaks the fourth wall by complaining about the gameplay tutorial he's forced to endure: 'Just let me kill people, dammit!' he yells to no one in particular. Indeed, Blood Dragon makes the latest game in that franchise – Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, released just a few months ago – look even more awful and ridiculous, since it un-ironically stars a raspy-voiced cyborg ninja. If his performance and the game's silliness as a whole aren't a purposeful mockery of the Metal Gear series, then I must be losing my mind. He takes the whole raspy-voiced, anti-hero shtick to a whole new level of brilliance here. Naturally, Colt is both.Ĭolt is voiced by Michael Biehn, the actor who played the heroes in both The Terminator (Reese!) and Aliens (Hicks!), two landmark 80s sci-fi films. That's because in the 80s, two things were cool: cyborgs and ninjas. Even the tigers that roam the dystopian island where the story takes place are cyborgs.

Yes, there are a lot of cyborgs in this game. Into this milieu steps Sergeant Rex 'Power' Colt, a Mark IV cyborg ninja who must take on Omega Force, a cyborg army led by Colonel Sloane, himself a former cyborg ally also who happens to have the blood of dragons coursing through his veins. If the visuals don't take you back, the accompanying music will – it's a vintage 80s action movie soundtrack, with synth drums and electronic trumpets immediately evoking memories of The Terminator or any number of Vangelis soundtracks. The backstory unfolds through the sort of retro eight-bit animation found in Super Nintendo games, back when Alf was on TV and Bryan Adams was topping the charts. The Montrealers who created the game couldn't help themselves: They chose to nuke Toronto in the opening scene. The year is 2007 (about as far into the future anyone in the eighties could see), and the world – especially Canada – has been ravaged by nuclear war between the Americans and the Soviets. A first-person shooter, it's completely unlike the rest of the genre because it's a hilarious riff on Reagan-era future-pocalypse sci-fi. At once based on Far Cry 3 – which recently took top honours at the Canadian Videogame Awards as the best game of 2012 – while at the same time having nothing to do with it.

It's one of the most unique releases of the year: a brilliant homage to the games and movies of the 1980s, yet it's also a biting mockery of them. Who the hell at Ubisoft gave Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon the go-ahead? And more importantly, how can I shake his or her hand?

Far cry 3 blood dragon intro