Trials of the Blood Dragon Reviews
Why Trials of the Blood Dragon exists, we have no idea… it’s quite clearly one of the worst games I have played, ever, and is a game with no redeeming qualities. Save your money, folks, this one is a stinker. A proper stinker!
A highly lacklustre standalone addition to both the Trials and the Blood Dragon series. Trials of the Blood Dragon is a pointless exercise that suffers from far too much awful platforming, and a very tight-fisted use of the Trials set up. It has nothing worthwhile to say for either franchise, and frankly doesn’t deserve your money or your attention.
Trials of the Blood Dragon shows promise when it's allowed to be a Trials game. The rest of the time, it's just bad.
I’ll give Trials of the Blood Dragon props for being creative, but most of the time, that’s all it can manage. Mechanics are disjointed, and gameplay is a general slog, with spiking points of interest. In summary, it’s like the previously released Awesome Level Max on spiked hallucinogenics.
When it comes down to it, Trials of the Blood Dragon feels like some fans wanted to do something with the story and somehow incorporate it into a game. That game was a motocross game. If the entire game was more platforming and less motorcycles and vehicles, it had potential to be entertaining. The game only offers a single player experience, as well. Hopefully, the release of this game will jolt Ubisoft into doing an actual sequel or a prequel to the actual Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon game. Trials of the Blood Dragon is available on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Steam for $14.99, which is a fair price.
Disappointingly, Trials of the Blood Dragon isn't the mashup that fans hoped for. While it manages to capture the trippy vibe of Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, it doesn't replicate the fast-paced action of Trials.
Trials of the Blood Dragon is massively disappointing. Its story is muddled and confusing, its jokes fall flat, and its gameplay is frustrating. Fantastic presentation and well-tuned motorbike physics don't make up for what is ultimately a failed experiment.
Despite being a standalone game, Trials of the Blood Dragon is at best a quirky aside to Trials Fusion. With so many truly ridiculous ideas in the story, they’ve given themselves free license to experiment and try new things, but so many of them simply don’t come off and aren’t that much fun. Let’s cross our fingers that RedLynx get back to what the series is so good at with their next game.
Truly, the best thing to come out of Trials of the Blood Dragon is that we get a continuation of the Blood Dragon story and a setup for a possible proper sequel. Other than that, it's a forgettable jumble of things that don't live up to either the Trials or the Blood Dragon names. It's kind of ironic that Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon is one of the best-executed novel gimmicks in recent memory, because taking that idea and tweaking it to a new extreme has made Trials of the Blood Dragon one of the worst.
In the end, Trials of the Blood Dragon is a mess. The platforming is barely passable, and several mechanics feel terrible to use. The biking portions work, but the change in physics systems messes things up just as the game becomes tougher. The presentation is lackluster, and the story tries too hard to top the original game but doesn't manage to achieve the same level of charm. It can be finished off in a relatively short amount of time, but fans of either franchise won't want to bother. Unless you're insanely curious, Trials of the Blood Dragon is best left alone.
This feels like a very capable studio being told to annualise a series that really didn't need to be yearly, because it bypasses everything that makes Trials great.
This just seems like Ubisoft said "do this" and Red Lynx had no choice but to follow orders, consequences be damned. Now, their goodwill and reputation have been burned through.
There is a solid core game here in Trials of the Blood Dragon, the problem is when the team extends away from that core to do other things. Not all of the motorbike tracks are great, but that is true of the Trials games as well. The platforming segments are terrible, however, some of the more bombastic and colourful stages are an absolute joy to play, and the neon visuals and pounding soundtrack do an excellent job of selling the action.
Avoid it all together, if we're being honest. If you do want some delicate bike physics action, you're much better off with the previous major entry: Trials Fusion.
As loud, brash, and in your face Trials of the Blood Dragon is, it’s all over after a few hours. So it doesn’t outstay its welcome. Which is about the highest praise you can assign to this oddity. Part ‘80s love letter, part Trials game, part mash-up of new and mostly terrible play styles.
With 30 levels, too few of them being actual trials and too many being stupid platforming, Trials of the Blood Dragon seems nothing more than an attempt at showing off what a few developers could do after getting drunk and watching 80 action movies and Saturday morning cartoons. The disappointing thing is this could have been so much better by simplifying the concept and making it a DLC map pack for Trials Fusion. Die-hard Trials fans will play this once, but probably never again; that said, they might enjoy it. Die-hard Blood Dragon fans will be unimpressed.
Trials of the Blood Dragon continues the storyline from where Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon ended. If you’re driven to find out what happens next to Rex Power Colt and his two kids, Roxanne and Slayter, it looks like you’re buying this game. You won’t hate it, and the charm of the presentation is enough to keep you moving forward, just don’t expect it to be the thrill that other Trials games have been able to deliver.
RedLynx and Ubisoft's weird mashup could have worked, but it gets derailed whenever it goes off the track
In the end this feels like an attempt to sell Trials to new players, but newcomers aren't going to learn what makes the core games so much fun and old-timers will be wondering what is going on.
Trials of the Blood Dragon gets some things very right and other things very wrong, and unfortunately it ends up being a mixed bag. Hopefully we get a true Blood Dragon sequel at some point, because this would be an unfortunate sendoff for this promising series.