QCF: Trials of the Blood Dragon

ou know what made David Sandberg’s Kung Fury so endearing and enjoyable? It genuinely convinced you to feel good about romanticizing the nostalgia of the 80’s and the pop culture of that generation, making so easy for the audience to buy into the love letter that it was creating.

With a runtime of just 31 minutes, the direction of its presentation and callbacks within its theatrics exuded a sense of authenticity; it just knew when to slap you in the face with something neon and low-res, and when to subtly drop a synthesized interlude to the scene from the soundtrack…

Kung Fury is the finest example of how to glamorize the culture and style of that era, and the closest video game equivalent to that success would be FarCry 3: Blood Dragon—the design and tone of that game managed to hit upon those same principles, and successfully conveyed 80’s sentimentality as well as a result.

So I’m sad to say that I’m a little surprised, and gravely disappointed that Trials of The Blood Dragon didn’t follow suit, and almost delivers a reverse effect. It constantly vomits out nostalgic imagery and noise from the era it panders to without any specific rhyme or reason other than to be as obnoxious with its aesthetic as it possibly can.

With a premise that’s more vapid than it is tongue-in-cheek, You’ll take on the roles of Saturday-morning soaked brat pack who’re tasked with saving the world from the evil “commies” coined as what Ubisoft could’ve only assumed to be clever as “Vietnam War 4”—I couldn’t make this shit up if I wanted you guys.

I digress though, I’ve already done plenty to dump on its piss-poor presentation, and we’ve established that it’s fallen harder than flat, let’s talk about the actual gameplay here. For devoted fans that’re coming into this as another entry to the Trials series, let me be frank and say that this entry is the furthest thing that you could get from a good Trials game; it doesn’t have any of the qualities that even make those games so good.

The adrenaline rush of nailing the perfect, stunt-heavy run through cleverly designed courses within subtle eye-catching locales is now replaced with soullessly driving through a collection underwhelming obstacles under a visual mash of splotchy colors through a VHS resolution filter that couldn’t possibly aggrandize its retro theme more repugnantly if it even wanted to. The most depth the game has to throw at you is twin-stick shooting, which honestly, doesn’t fit at all well into the dynamics of Trials gameplay, it’s just dumb.

That engaging sense of drive that the series is iconic for is absent from this iteration, because there’s no real incentive to show off here. The game’s only concerned with you moving from point A to point B so it can get on with spouting out its irreverent one-liners, which is even more irksome considering that they’ll play over, and over again with every restart that happens on each and every stage. And believe it or not, that was just covering the “enjoyable” portion that Trials of the Blood Dragon has to offer, because for some reason, the people at Redlynx actually thought that adapting run ‘n gun platforming gameplay into the Trials engine was a good idea to run with…

Well let me tell you guys, it isn’t, because this is where the spin-off is at its absolute worst—its shit to be frank.

This engine just wasn’t built for traditional platforming, and these sections of the campaign make that very clear. The jumping physics are atrocious as you plummet to ground in every leap without any time to determine the apex to the peak of your jump, or distance needed to cross a gap, or reach the height needed. It’s as if you’re jumping with cement shoes on while still moving around at a fast slippery speed, almost the way you’d imagine how a refrigerator on roller-skates would move.

The twin-stick shooting is just as clunky, and doesn’t respond nearly as quickly as it should, so enemy-heavy areas of a stage that demand a twitch-ready trigger finger will only serve to frustrate you, especially in the nonsensically tedious stealth sections of a level. I know it may seem like I’m exaggerating my criticism on this experimental direction, but from the moment it was introduced, the experience was just too flawed to stomach through, and it just got worse, and worse as it went on. The further you advance in the campaign of Trials of the Blood Dragon, the more prevalent these stages are, and then that’s when I realized that were more platforming levels than bike levels—in a TRIALS game!

There’s not much else left to say; on paper, the idea of mixing together grappling hooks, 80’s nostalgia, shooting, and Trials gameplay together genuinely does sound a curious one that’s worth exploring if you blend them just right—that’s just not the case here. No, instead of carefully constructing these concepts together into a quirky yet sensible fashion, Ubisoft and Redlynx signed off on a game that plays like all of these ideas were thrown at a wall on top of one another, hoping that it would all just stick together well enough to ship out in time for the week of E3.

I highly recommend to avoid this disappointment of a game, especially if you’re already a Trials fan, because TOTBD will only exist to break your heart.