Parents' Guide to Trials of the Blood Dragon

Players who aren't familiar with 1980s action movies may not understand much of the humor in this game or get its countless references to films like The Terminator and On Deadly Ground. Older players with a bit more cinematic history, on the other hand, will likely let out frequent guffaws as Trials of the Blood Dragon leads them through sections of dialogue and plot twists both warmly familiar and patently ridiculous. Few games deliver jokes as rapidly -- or reliably funny -- as this one.

Sadly, what we get up to outside the story sequences isn't always as satisfying. Vehicle levels are by and large fantastic, exploiting the terrific physics-based mechanics that made earlier Trials games so popular while setting the action in wonderfully bizarre locations both of and not of this Earth. The riding never gets quite as difficult as it has been in previous games in the series, but it still requires a deft hand and plenty of patience. The platformer and action sequences are where things start to bog down. The controls for running and jumping are pretty clunky, and the level design is uninspired. Plus enemies tend to pop up with almost no warning and with no way to avoid their attacks, which will likely result in a lot of unavoidable deaths. The result is an inconsistent experience likely to make many players alternate between laughing aloud and wanting to toss their controllers.