I had more fun with Ubisoft’s Captain Laserhawk than most Ubisoft games

polygon.com:

Captain Laserhawk: A Blood Dragon Remix, Ubisoft’s new (very) adult animated series for Netflix, may not be what you’re expecting. That is, unless you know creator and executive producer Adi Shankar’s work, which takes beloved, carefully protected pop culture characters and reinterprets them in subversive, often graphically violent ways.

Most importantly: Despite its title, don’t expect this to be a Far Cry animated series. Outside of an appearance from Far Cry 4 bad guy Pagan Min, Captain Laserhawk has little in the way of that game series’ DNA.

Instead, for Captain Laserhawk Shankar has plucked a handful of Ubisoft characters from across the game maker’s catalog and thrust them into a dystopian technocratic sci-fi future. Beloved mascot platformer Rayman appears as a TV host and propagandist, who is at various points shown snorting something illicit and hosting an execution on live television. The Assassin’s Creed franchise is represented in the show not by Ezio or Basim, but by a badass anthropomorphic frog assassin. Rabbids are interdimensional interlopers who make an all-too-brief appearance.

Virtually all modern Ubisoft franchises, from Watch Dogs and Beyond Good & Evil to various Tom Clancy games, are thrown into Shankar’s new animated concoction and boiled into something shockingly potent.

But Captain Laserhawk isn’t as tonally dissonant as it sounds. It feels believable that all these characters, headlined by a cyborg super-soldier named Dolph Laserhawk, could exist in the same bizarre world, that their relationships could be so intertwined. The show’s breakneck pace and colorful side characters sell the premise of a futuristic world gone mad.

Shankar’s disjointed references also help: Captain Laserhawk is part