Ubisoft's return to Steam has continued slowly but surely since September 2024, when the company finally decided that enough was enough and it was time to start selling games where people actually want to buy them. That means day-one releases on Steam, which is a big deal in its own right, but Ubisoft has been going an extra step by adding Steam achievements to its older games on the storefront. That's nice, although it doesn't really interest me personally—or at least it didn't until today, because today Ubisoft brought that love to what is possibly its greatest videogame ever.
I am of course talking about Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, the "'80s vision of the future" starring Rex "Power" Colt, whose mission in the futuristic world of 2007 is to kill everything, get the girl, and save the world. "Experience every cliché of a VHS era vision of a nuclear future, where cyborgs, blood dragons, mutants, and Michael Biehn collide," the Steam page promises, and let me tell you as someone who grew up in the era of Terminator, Aliens, and Navy Seals, it works: It's dumber than hell and an absolute blast.
Blood Dragon is, at its core, a Far Cry game, but it strips out a lot of the extraneous nonsense in favor of a focus on blasting and cheesy one-liners. Schwarzenegger, Stallone, and Van Damme didn't worry about the niceties of a coherent story, so why should you? Naturally the experience is most effective if you have an appreciation for '80s action flicks, and the jokes can sometimes wear a bit thin, but even without that context it's exactly the sort of top-tier silly fun you'd expect from a game about a guy who's got "the robo-balls to destroy evil."
(That's a Rex Colt guarantee, by the way.)
So there's a lot to recommend about Blood Dragon (the soundtrack is great too), and now there's Steam achievements on top of everything else. The achievements aren't quite as on-point as I would've made them—I'm sure Ubisoft could've easily filled the list with great movie quotes—but they're fun in their own right. A few notable examples:
- Nice Like Jesus
- Murder Nature
- What Are You Reading For?
- Running Man
- Derp
- The Drug of the Nation
If you've already unlocked Blood Dragon achievements in Ubisoft Connect, they'll automatically transfer over when you launch the game on Steam. And look, I admit, slamming achievements on a 12-year-old shooter isn't the biggest deal ever, but it's Blood Dragon! I will never not take the opportunity to wave my hands around and talk about Blood Dragon, the only Ubisoft game I've ever really loved—and one that, even now, I sometimes find hard to believe was actually allowed to be made.
