It turns out I greatly underestimated how much Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon there actually was. I don't quite have 100% completion - I still have a few weapon upgrades I haven't bought yet - but I have completed all the story and side missions, collected all the televisions, vhs tapes, and secret research files, hunted all the animals, and liberated all the bases. I could dither around the map for awhile, grinding for the thousands of credits necessary to trick out my sniper rifle, but sources of money are increasingly rare and I wouldn't have anything to shoot with that rifle besides. On the other hand, it would kill some time.
The last mission was the most on-point as a movie parody, featuring a training montage set to a generically upbeat rock anthem and a gratuitous and oddly explicit sex scene, but then you find a robotic dinosaur with a laser cannon on its head and the game once again becomes a celebration of excess.
Which is fine. I like the explosions and cheesy puns (and the way Rex quips with grade-school word-play whenever he makes a kill is a hilarious running joke) and I think I could easily have played in this world for another thirty or forty hours and not have gotten bored. So it's kind of disappointing that it's ended so soon.
I'm not sure what I'd have added to stretch things out. Maybe some vehicle missions, just to get some more use out of what seems like a vestigial mechanic from Far Cry 3. Or something to flesh out the backstory of all these scientist-type people who seem to be your allies. And it probably would have been nice to have some foreshadowing of the mysterious extra-dimensional temple that forced me to fight waves of zombies before it gave me the ultimate weapon. I mean really, what was up with that place?
Oh, and I probably would have given the game a final boss battle instead of killing off Colonel Sloan in a cutscene.
I guess what I'll do next is start a new save file from the very beginning and see if there's any nuance or subtext I missed on the first time round. My guess is that there's not going to be much of that. Nothing about Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon suggests it's a "nuance" or "subtext" type of game, but you never know.
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