Remember how many people within the games industry swore blind that Web 3 gaming would be the future? It hasn’t quite panned out that way, of course, but there are some who are still chipping away at the rockface, one of which is embattled French publisher Ubisoft.
It has just released Captain Laserhawk: The G.A.M.E., a spin-off of the Far Cry spin-off Blood Dragon which makes use of cryptocurrency and blockchain – two “revolutionary” elements which, we were told, were going to change the gaming landscape forever.
It only takes a short read of Polygon’s excellent hands-on coverage of Captain Laserhawk to convince you to completely forget this game ever existed. It’s a painfully basic top-down shooter with NFT nonsense forced upon it – it won’t even boot up unless you have a cryptocurrency wallet connected and have purchased one of the required NFT characters.
What’s especially sad about all of this is that Ubisoft has seen fit to include Rayman in the game as the announcer for its deathmatches. Oh, and you can also purchase a Rayman profile pic for 7500 virtual coins (according to Polygon, at the time of writing, less than 10 of these have been purchased from a stock of 425).
To be fair, Rayman does have a connection with Captain Laserhawk and was featured in Netflix’s animation series of the same name recently – but that doesn’t totally excuse his cynical inclusion in such an insipid game as this.
It all sounds like a total trainwreck to us, but who knows, maybe this thing will take off and all of us sceptics will look very stupid. However, I’m willing to bet that doesn’t happen.
