There's a creative stagnation at the heart of contemporary blockbuster game development that has begun to calcify over the past few years of annual Call of Duty updates and endless me-too clones. Elsewhere this appropriation of random elements from the yuppie decade continues, with collectible VHS tapes and CRT TV sets to find and D20 dice to throw in order to distract the guards (while the jet-skis and jeeps remain weirdly contemporary). The new paint job works wonders for generating a new sense of place, but the gratuitous swearing in the voice over and 16-bit style pixel art cutscenes jars with the Saturday morning cartoon aesthetic, confusing the parody's focus. Liberate these (by murdering its present incumbents) and you'll turn it over to your "side", unlocking a new base of operations (which can be teleported to from anywhere on the map) and a clutch of new side missions, the completion of which unlocks upgrades for your increasingly devastating arsenal of weapons. The futuristic island is pocked with enemy garrisons. Some of the low level interactions have been evolved (you can follow up a stealth kill on an enemy cyborg with a shuriken to a second's throat, while completing objectives earns cyber-points which level up your character, extending his health and upgrading his abilities) but underneath the hood the Far Cry 3 basics largely stand resolute. Could this be the era of the video game remix, in which best-selling games are re-clothed and re-sold mere months after launch? A new color palette and an asset swap ("Make the trustafarian explorer a crunchy cyborg", "Make the alligators 20-foot laser-firing dragons") and it is money for old code… In this way Blood Dragon shows how game publishers can squeeze further wealth from their most costly games. But in the way it seizes and repaints Far Cry 3's ample world and engine, borrowing the multimillion-dollar bulk of a game created over years by a team of hundreds, thereby delivering the sort of scope and value no download game build from scratch could possibly match. Not in terms of length – a competent player will get decent change from six hours' investment. It is, perhaps, the first blockbuster-scale download title (an XBL-triple-A production, you might say).
B lood Dragon may appropriate the style and tone of 80s cartoons – from the chrome-plated logo, through the testosterone-drenched dialogue, to its Vangelis-esque soundtrack – but Ubisoft's digital download spin-off to last year's desert island combat game Far Cry 3 has future-facing ramifications.
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