I celebrated my birthday recently. As such, people go crazy. Jokes are played, and everything isn't taken at face value. Ubisoft decided that they would join in on the fun, too, and announce FarCry 3: Blood Dragon, except they were actually sorta serious.

What they did was take their existing FarCry 3 game, and splice it with retro-futurism, and splash in some Skyrim, for good measure. Full disclosure: I have not played FarCry 3, nor do I have it, so any comparisons are secondhand, lovingly curated from reviews and heresay. This future is reminiscent of the 80s, with TVs and VHS galore. Instead of the iron curtain falling and the dot com boom, the 90s was dominated by nuclear war. There was something about a Vietnam War 2, nuking Canada, then invading it and Australia. Thus it makes sense that everyone was more concerned about survival instead of improving video formats.

The whole story plays on all the troupes, good and bad, from 80s (and 90s?) action movies. Overflowing with cheezy one-liners, it is book-ended with lots of explosions. It also makes fun of itself and modern gaming, starting with the player character complaining about the bad tutorial.

Apparently, everyone and everything is now a cyborg: every person and every animal. Like the original game, the wildlife is dangerous. Scattered around the island are enemy garrisons, which you can take down in several ways. The vast majority of them, you can disable or destroy the blood dragon shields to let them in and kill everyone inside. Alternatively, you can kill everyone yourself.

The blood dragons themselves are like cyborg T-Rexes that can shoot lasers out of their eyes (as shown, charging up). Good for you, they can be controlled somewhat. Whenever you kill a (cyborg) human enemy, you can rip out their hearts. You throw these hearts to lure the dragons around. To lure human enemies around, you literally throw a d20. As in, throw the die itself at them.

Out in the open, enemies and friendlies spawn frequently, as does the occasional dragon. Like FarCry 3, things can catch fire. So when flamer and molotov enemies show up, everything catches fire, and firestorms race across meadows and hillsides.

This game is crazy, illogical, and hilarious. It knows it's a game, and tells you to go have fun. It is loaded with originality, at least for gaming. Perhaps this is the kick in the balls that the big triple-A gaming industry needs right now; throw away the focus groups, fire most of the marketing department, and just make something cool and different. I hear that it was a miracle that this even got made, and it also sold about 5 times what was expected. It's also pretty cheap at 15 bucks, and that's a pretty good deal.