Platform racer series Trials has never taken itself too seriously. It’s been increasingly indulging its weird side lately, however, edging away from a stripped-down, mud ’n’ grit style and heading for grandstanding stunts, pyrotechnics and all-round silliness. As a spin-off that inserts all that into the ’80s action-movie universe of Far Cry 3, Blood Dragon seems to make sense. Enough, certainly, to make it Kind Of A Big Deal when Ubisoft revealed it would be available as soon as its E3 conference was over.
You’d think you were in for a good time. But you’d be wrong. Like trying to land a 50-foot jump while pulling a wheelie, Trials Of The Blood Dragon is a miscalculation that ends up in a mangled heap. Its main problem is trying to be too many things. RedLynx has understandably come to the conclusion that it would be daft to have two action heroes (the son and daughter of Blood Dragon’s cybernetic lead Rex Colt) save the world. But its solution – to intersperse classic Trials-esque stages with platforming interludes, stealth sections and boss fights – doesn’t work.
When you’re on your bike, it’s mostly good Trials-y fun. The tracks don’t have the intricacy of the series’ toughest courses, but the vivid presentation enlivens them no end. It’s garish and overblown, usually with something exploding nearby and giant monsters rampaging in the background. In one level, you have to get through while under the influence of some powerful hallucinogens. As the tracks twist and the scenery woozily shifts, it’s clear your biggest obstacle is getting distracted by everything around you.
Give It A Ride Berth
Then you step off the pedals and it all falls apart. The platforming is embarrassingly bad – it makes Sackboy look like Nathan Drake. These sequences are so poorly conceived they feel like throwaway fan-made levels.
They might just about pass muster as user-created one-offs, but they’re built by a professional game dev, they take up a substantial portion of a not-very-substantial running time, and they are rotten. Worse is to come in the form of gaming’s most inexplicably terrible jetpack, and a controller-obliteratingly awful stage involving the transportation of a bomb.
A gun and a grappling hook are acceptable additions by comparison. The latter has a loose elasticity that doesn’t quite fit with the otherwise robust bike physics, while obligingly dense enemies compensate for the awkwardness of adjusting your position with the left stick as you aim with the right.
Even the tone is scattershot: stylistic flourishes riff on ’70s grindhouse cinema, and there are a few ’90s references, too. It’s so relentlessly potty that you’ll crack the occasional grin, but otherwise this is – by some distance – a series low.
The post Trials Of The Blood Dragon – Redlynx’s Mash-Up Is A Serious Misfire appeared first on Gamers Unite!.
from
http://www.accessibilityforum.org/trials-blood-dragon-redlynxs-mash-serious-misfire/
No comments:
Post a Comment