As 2025 Approaches, Ubisoft Ships a New NFT Game Featuring Rayman

As we approach 2025, Ubisoft continues to pretend that fully discredited 2021 trends like NFTs and Web3 gaming are still relevant by releasing yet another NFT game earlier this week featuring Rayman and expanding the universe of Netflix's Captain Laserhawk: A Blood Dragon Remix series, itself based on Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon.

First spotted by Axios' Stephen Totilo, the project is called Captain Laserhawk: the G.A.M.E., and much like Ubisoft's previous foray into blockchain gaming – Champions Tactics, unveiled back in October and rendered unplayable just a few weeks after – it was released in a quiet manner, with no announcements shared on Ubisoft's official social media pages or its website. Whether the low-profile launch was because Champions Tactics' example satisfied the studio's executives or because Ubisoft is fully aware that openly promoting NFT projects would sink its reputation even further is currently up for debate.

As a video game, Captain Laserhawk is just as uninspiring as one might expect – a dime-a-dozen top-down battle arena shooter with its only standout feature being the name of its developer. Even by the already low standards of blockchain gaming, The G.A.M.E. feels boring – with tedious gameplay, lifeless visual style and graphics, and zero innovative features – screaming with every fiber of its being that more effort went into setting up the "NFT" part of the project than the game itself.

Speaking of those, the game explicitly requires you to own an NFT to play – in this case, a Niji Warrior card that you can customize and that evolves based on your in-game achievements. As noted by Totilo, who actually wasted $25 just to see what these NFTs are about, the idea seems to be that each card would become more unique over time and, therefore, expensive. If true, this seems like yet another case of Web3 peddlers forgetting that every grain of sand is unique, yet sand sells for $7.50 a ton, not tens of thousands of dollars per grain.

Captain Laserhawk's in-game marketplace features the usual stuff like emotes, gun skins, and outfits, which can be bought and sold to other players. As for the aforementioned Rayman, besides acting as the announcer for the game's deathmatches, he's also available as a legendary-tier profile picture that can be purchased for 7,500 virtual coins and attached to a player's Niji Warrior card.

As a cherry on top, you have to jump through several hoops just to buy an NFT card, including creating a Ubisoft account, residing in specific countries – with the list of prohibited regions not only including one's usual troubled, war-torn areas but also unexpected gaming hubs like China, South Korea, and, most hilariously, Ubisoft's home country of France – connecting your crypto wallet to the account, and, of course, accepting the company's Terms of Service, which, as usual, contain some questionable provisions, such as 15.1(b), where Ubisoft states it doesn't guarantee their games are free of "errors, bugs, viruses, or harmful elements" and makes no promises that these issues would ever be fixed if present.

After checking out the game's website, the only somewhat noteworthy tidbit (aside from Ubisoft making its latest 'masterpiece' unavailable in France) I was able to find was a paragraph on its About page, featuring phrases like "used to be the most popular company", "U.B.I.", "a nefarious Board of Directors", and "overwhelming propaganda". Given who the developer of Captain Laserhawk: The G.A.M.E. is and its current state right now, this description may certainly feel like a hidden cry for help, but may also be a simple coincidence. As always, you be the judge:

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