We have the 1980s to thank for any number of embarrassing cultural trends - neoliberalism, an epidemic of mullets, Christopher Lambert's acting career - but sometimes I think the decade's most terrible legacy is allowing video game creators to pass off shabby design as quasi-satirical retro entertainment.
Take Trials of the Blood Dragon, RedLynx's rather inexplicable sequel to Ubisoft Montreal's open world shooter spoof Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon. Is it a wayward, drunken mess of a game that buries a fabulous platforming pedigree in bolt-on mechanics and garish production values? Why yes, of course it is. But don't you see? That's the point! Everything was crappy in the 1980s. It was an age of unbridled material excess, all surface glitter and no substance. To expect anything genuinely considered or elegant (or even just plain fun) for the £12 Ubisoft is asking would be to do the premise, nay, the era itself a disservice.
It almost sounds convincing at a distance, but this isn't our first ride on this particular rodeo. 80s spoofs are a well-established, surprisingly competitive subgenre, as RedLynx and Ubisoft rather self-defeatingly acknowledge here by referencing the likes of the acclaimed Hotline Miami, in amongst confused allusions to the Power Rangers, Super Soakers and Rambo. And Trials of the Blood Dragon is simply too shambolic and conflicted an experience to get away with being a work of irony or "unapologetic" nostalgia.
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