Ubisoft’s logo appears as if playing off a video cassette that had recorded the opening of some movie off the television. The menu screen loads up like a basic DOS menu. The loading screen notifies me that bullets are dangerous and transfer such STDs as Hollow-Point and Explosive. Michael Biehn, primarily known for his roles as Kyle Reese in Terminator and Corporal Hicks in Aliens, delivers poor one-liners to his marked-for-death best friend and comrade in arms. Control is given to me as the protagonist mans the turret of the helicopter. Long Tall Sally blares through the speakers as I proceed to mow down dozens of cyborg mooks trying to down my helicopter.

This past weekend I tried to explain to my brother and father why I felt the Expendables film series failed to be anything more than okay movies. To me, they should be the pinnacle of what all the 80’s action films, both generic and exceptional, strove to be. Stupid, sure, but delivering what no other action film could. Instead, it feels like too much time is given to generic and bland characters for trite bromances that aren’t even silly enough to warrant a chuckle, with the action scenes, while fun, being all too few and ultimately not that interesting. The likes of Terminator 2 still manage to be better films, and despite the large cast of actors, hardly any of them get time to truly shine.

I likened it to my disappointment in the older film Destroy All Monsters, a Godzilla film sporting almost a dozen monsters together in a single flick. However, instead of a non-stop brawl between titans, it was your average Godzilla movie with a skippable plot and handful of action sequences. Instead of being an incredible experience, it was just another Godzilla film that didn’t really do anything new or exceptional.

This comparison didn’t fly with my brother and father.

Instead, I wish I had managed to show them Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon. The game is the sort of love letter to the 80’s that I wanted The Expendables to be, but it doesn’t rely on cheap Internet gags and winks to the audience to deliver an incredible experience. Sure, it’s just as groan-worthy to hear Michael Biehn complain that he doesn’t want to collect feathers, a nod to Assassin’s Creed II, as it is to hear Chuck Norris spout out an already beaten to death Internet gag. I’m half expecting the third movie to spit “the cake is a lie” out and expect laughs from the audience.

Yet Blood Dragon also delivers on its own brand of ridiculous humor as well. Hostage rescues are worded in a manner that they’re all about saving nerds, completely disrespectful to the subject held captive. The loading screen provides hints informing the player that the loading screen provides hints. You toss a twenty-sided die in order to distract enemies. The game doesn’t merely rely on references to be humorous. It presents a self-aware love for everything it emulates. It is the Gloryhammer of video games.

Perhaps what it boils down to is the willingness to go all in on those stupid ideas, to tread ground that was so silly that it was never tread before. Giant reptiles that shoot laser beams out of their eyes? Sounds like something from a silly children’s cartoon, so fantastically stupid it would only occur in the 80’s as an action figure, and yet here it is presented with a straight face and legitimate threat. In fact, perhaps it is because Blood Dragon is a video game that I’m able to laugh right up until the point that I shout “oh shit!” Those lasers are no joke, after all, and it takes an awful lot of ammunition to kill a Blood Dragon proper.

When you get right down to it, Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon sits between creations like Sharknado, a blatantly stupid idea treated like it is a stupid idea, and The Expendables, a silly film treated way too seriously. Blood Dragon knows when to laugh at itself, but that doesn’t stop it from also being a solid experience nonetheless. It is a blast to play, enemies and monsters are appropriately threatening, and yet it never gives up that spirit of being rad. Every time you combat some beast modified by Godless cybernetics you unlock a description of that creature, a small bit of flavor text that reads more like a clever imgur comment than a sincere description of wildlife. Yet it fits. It’s hard to care about what Far Cry 3 has to say about the local breed of tiger, but you know you’re going to laugh when Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon describes the horrific, nightmarish proof that God hates all mankind when you’ve unlocked the Cyber Shark journal entry.

Which brings me to why I even played Blood Dragon if I couldn’t even be bothered to finish Far Cry 3. At first I thought it was merely the setting and theme. Blood Dragon amused me. I wanted to move on to the next mission because I wanted to see how crazy and funny the game would get (turns out, not really too much more, but just enough).

Only I didn’t just speed on through the story. I stopped and began doing all the side quest work, all the optional little touches that seemed way too tedious for me in Far Cry 3. Of course, in that game the island was a lot larger, everything was more spread out, and there was just way too much of it to complete. Character development and progress was also excruciatingly slow.

Blood Dragon, on the other hand, is a much smaller space where everything is closer together. You can reach a number of collectibles in the span of minutes before jumping into a brief side quest. Each fortress was much larger and designed in more unique ways, making every stealthy infiltration different from the previous. The protagonist was already quite strong in the beginning, but leveling up unlocked new abilities in a smaller time frame. Despite all this, the player was still never invincible and stakes were always being raised.

The game never felt difficult because abilities were locked away from me, it felt difficult because foes were a legitimate challenge. The enemy fortresses did not feel repetitive because they were designed to be large, unique, and with multiple points of entry. The wildlife did not seem anywhere near as vicious except for the Blood Dragons themselves, and while they weren’t necessarily easy to avoid, it was unlikely that the player would find themselves in combat with one unintentionally.

The greatest flaw in Blood Dragon is simply that the dark appearance of the game world is a major hindrance in caverns. There is no real night vision mode or flashlight available, so when the player must go spelunking for treasures they are often left without a clear method of finding the way out.

Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon is a silly idea taken seriously and a short, abridged version of an open world game that takes maybe ten hours at most to complete. Yet it does these things so well that I cannot help but absolutely love it. I will probably come back to this game in a few years just to give it another spin.