Holy Chimichangas, they made a Deadpool video game! They haven’t even gotten around to making that Deadpool movie they’re always talking about, and there isn’t anything else coming out to make this game a cash grab tie-in. Marvel and developer High Moon Studios just up and made a Deadpool video game for the sheer hell of it. How cool is that!? We all know how this works. Whenever a superhero movie or cartoon show comes out, some video game developer is hired to make a crummy tie-in game just to make some money. Then the best case scenario is that sometimes those games are mediocre. More often than not, they’re unplayable.

But every so often, once in half a dozen blue moons, a superhero video game is made to stand on its own, and we get a glorious gem like Batman: Arkham City!

And sometimes we get Deadpool, the game.

Who said that?

Game Rating: 6/10 – Pretty Good.

I have good news for Deadpool fans: this game is an absolute perfect adaptation of the character. Comic writer Daniel Way also penned the game, so the same style and humor he brought to the character in the comics is also on the screen. Deadpool is wacky, he’s crude, he breaks the Fourth Wall, he hallucinates and he never stops talking. He’s the Merc with the Mouth, so if you’ve been a fan of the character over the past few years, this game should be fantastic.

But we hate Daniel Way’s Deadpool.

I’ll get to that in a minute. Anyway, even though all of the Deadpoolness in the game is great, the game itself is achingly mediocre. High Moon Studios apparently spent all of their time perfecting the Deadpoolery, then just stapled it to a bare bones hack’n’slasher. The enemies are repetitive and unoriginal, the plot is non-existent, the levels are boring, and the few moments that actually break out of the mold are too short to actually make an impact. That’s not to say any of these things are bad, per se, they’re just bland and uninspired. The game itself is entirely average, but at a short 6 to 7 hours, maybe that’s all you need to enjoy such impressive amounts of Deadpoolocity.

So basically Deadpool, the game, is all about Deadpool. I think they get it.

Either way, join me after the jump for my full review!

For those who don’t know, Deadpool hails from Marvel Comics, the same people who publish Spider-Man and the X-Men. He’s one of the deadliest assassins in the world, so he’s proficient with all manner of weapons and firearms. That makes him kind of perfect for a game like this. He’s also certifiably insane, of the ‘Cuckoo for Cocoa Puff’s variety, which is also kind of perfect for a game like this. Deadpool is constantly making jokes and spouting off one-liners, and some of them are actually funny. I don’t think I ever laughed out loud, but there were definitely some chuckles. Deadpool is also self-aware to the point that he knows he’s a character in a comic book (and in a video game), so he’s always breaking the Fourth Wall and talking directly to the player, which is neat. He also hallucinates himself into other styles of video games, like a top-down RPG level and a few minutes spent in a side-scrolling platformer, among other wild and wacky hallucinations. Deadpool is also constantly conversing with the voices in his head, providing a running commentary of the game.

Oh, so that’s what we’re parodying.

If you like Deadpool at his wacky and wild best, then this game will be a dream come true. And a video game is the perfect Deadpool adaptation. Unless they give him his own raunchy Saturday Morning Cartoon, Marvel is never going to be able to produce a Deadpool this insane. No live action movie starring Ryan Reynolds could ever live up to the madness of this video game. This is Deadpool made by the fans for the fans.

And all you lazy bums deserve each other

On a personal note, I’m not a fan. I read Way’s Deadpool comic for awhile, but eventually I just stopped caring. In my opinion, Deadpool has just become too wacky of a character, and his humor is more infantile than intelligent, which is what I prefer.

Despite our own lack of intelligence or humor.

Breaking the Fourth Wall, ogling boobies and shouting “Chimichangas!” over and over again is just not funny, in and of themselves. Maybe they’re funny to some people, but not to me. One of the best Deadpool appearances ever, in my opinion, is his cameo in that DVD release Hulk vs. a few years ago. He’s funny and used very well in context. His lines and jokes are not just random insanity, they’re keyed in to the characters and scenes around him. It’s also neat to note that in both that DVD and this game, Deadpool voiced by Nolan North, who just does a fantastic job on the character.

Speaking of my tastes in Deadpool, this is my favorite Deadpool joke of all time:

Now that’s funny.

Maybe.

It’s a clever parody of Spider-Man’s famous line, “My spider sense is tingling”. So it combines breaking the Fourth Wall with a play on words, making for a short, witty bit of comic bookery. But that is the Deadpool of old, back before he become a huge fan favorite sensation thanks to an over-reliance of pop culture references and the repeated use of the word ‘Chimichangas’.

Which are delicious, by the way. Try some. Only $6.95 per case at your local supermarket. Bring a coupon.

But again, that’s just my personal sense of humor. I don’t like Daniel Way’s Deadpool, but clearly a large number of comic book fans do, and that’s who they made this video game for. So I’m just going to be grateful that Marvel decided to make a full video game for one of their less-than-mainstream characters. And it’s clear that High Moon Studios put a lot of effort into getting Deadpool exactly right. As a comic book fan, what more can we ask for?

How about a decent game?

Whoops! Wrong game

So yeah, I mentioned this before, and it’s the cold hard truth: the game itself is very average. I would have given it a lower score, but the clear effort in capturing Deadpool’s character kicked the game up a couple notches. The game is your typical hack’n’slash sort of game. Deadpool has swords and guns, and you fight through wave after wave of bad guy until you reach your objective. Each of the weapons is upgradeable, but the upgrades don’t change the gameplay whatsoever. They’re mostly things like ‘increased ammo’, ‘increased rate of fire’ or ‘increased damage’. You buy these upgrades with ‘DP Points’, which are collectibles you find scattered throughout the level, or you get points for killing bad guys. There are no alternate costumes or hilarious cheats like ‘Big Head Mode’ or anything that might actually be fun to unlock.

Whoever failed to give this game a Big Head Mode needs to be dragged out into the street and shot. 

The game throws in some combos, finishing movies and the ability to switch between blades and guns on the fly, but none of that really amounts to anything spectacular. I found myself mildly entertained by it all, but then everybody likes a solidly made hack’n’slash. It’s also pretty fun to slash through one bad guy then immediately turn around and blast another in the face with a shotgun without breaking stride.

But a solid, average hack’n’slash is just not going to cut it in this day and age. It’s been done a million times over. Gamers like me want to be impressed!

I do like how he keeps his reds all bright and shiny

A friend of mine has something she calls the ‘Bayonetta Test’. The game Bayonetta is also a typical hack’n’slash, but the developers of that game pushed the villains and the settings to the extreme. Bayonetta involved scenes where you ride a motorcycle up the side of a rocket while it’s taking off. Or you fight an army of demons while standing on the bodily chunks of a dead demigod as they fall towards Earth, forcing you to jump from body part to body part in mid-plummet.

Sounds hot.

Well, Bayonetta was the character whose costume and weapons are made out of her hair, so every time she needs to make a sword, she loses a bit more clothing.

Get our mind out of the gutter.

I was just saying…

Deadpool? 

Oh right. Well, there are no similar jaw-dropping moments in the Deadpool game. The levels are painfully boring. There’s an office building, two different kinds of sewers, ancient caverns and a ruined cityscape. And that’s pretty much it. Exactly like you see in every other game. Nothing extreme, nothing wild, nothing that really pushes the envelope, even though Deadpool would be totally perfect for that kind of insanity. There are a few fun moments, but they’re definitely few and far between. Most of the game takes place on the island of Genosha, which is littered with broken Sentinel parts, and there are times where you need to repower a giant Sentinel limb in order to clear a path or make a jump. There’s also one part where you activate a Sentinel’s rocket boot and use it to bounce around to different places, and a different part where you turn on a Sentinel’s hand laser to blow up some enemies, but these are quick, one-time events.

And yet, despite all of these Sentinels lying around, you never actually have to fight a fully-powered, giant Sentinel. Total waste!

That Deadpool doesn’t have to fight a giant, evil robot is a crime against humanity. All video games should have a fight with a giant monster.

Like Shadow of the Colossus, but with the actual X-Man, Colossus.

Nice.

Thank you. So anyway, the boring levels in Deadpool show a few short glimmers of something new and interesting, but they never go all the way. I mentioned how at least twice, the game switches to different game styles, like a top-down, 8-bit Zelda-like segment, then another time when it becomes a side-scrolling platformer. These moments were fun, but they were all too brief, lasting only a couple of minutes. Where were the other parodied video game styles? Deadpool should have done a lot more with this part of the game. Where was the fighting game parody? Or the first-person shooter parody? Or the Farmville parody? Deadpool missed out on a lot of potential fun.

Though it clearly has some fun

I’ve avoided talking about the plot all this time because there really isn’t one. The overarching plot is that Deadpool is on the phone with the CEO of High Moon Studios pitching his own video game, which you’re playing. But the gameplay plot is standard superhero stuff, only filled with comments and jokes about how Deadpool is aware that he’s in a video game. Because that’s how he rolls.

Gangsta.

Deadpool travels to Genosha to defeat Mr. Sinister, but I’m not entirely sure what evil plan Mr. Sinister is up to or why he needs to be defeated. He’s just the villain, so Deadpool goes to fight him. And it’s not like Mr. Sinister is a Deadpool foe from the comics. He’s an X-Men bad guy. Speaking of which, some of the X-Men do make a few cameos in the game, but they’re mostly just fan service. Or eye-candy for Deadpool to drool over. The only standout is Cable, Deadpool’s frequent partner from the comics. Cable is actually kind of fantastic in the game, in that he’s the only one who really seems to understand how Deadpool’s brain works, and he uses that knowledge to get Deadpool to do what he wants. This game is probably the best Cable adaptation too.

Which isn’t saying much

There’s no real story progression in the game. Each level has an objective, but rarely does that objective have anything to do with Mr. Sinister or his evil plan. You basically just go from level to level until the game decides you’ve reached the end and puts you on the last level.

That god damned last level. Grrr!

I’m getting to that. Anyway, as a result, none of the bad guys are all that memorable. Mr. Sinister is known for making clones, so that’s the excuse the game provides for why you have to fight the same henchmen over and over, and there’s only about half a dozen different varieties. There are henchmen with guns, henchmen with swords, henchmen who fly, henchmen with bigger guns; etc. And you kill them all the same way, so it’s not like you really need to change up your strategy. You just hack, slash and shoot your way through whatever the game throws at you.

Tell them about the Gambit clones!

Oh right! There is at least one funny bit where Sinister creates an army of failed Gambit clones, and they just charge at you shouting “Mon Ami” before exploding. That was kind of funny…the first time. Every follow-up appearance by the Gambit clones was not nearly as funny. They’re a one-note joke played far too often and randomly.

Zut alors!

And why stop at Gambit? Why not have Deadpool fight clones of all the X-Men? Why fight a henchman with swords when you could fight evil clone Wolverines? Or Colossus? Or Psylocke? That’s another wasted opportunity.

Beyond all of the uninspired story, villains and setting, the gameplay itself can be really wonky at times. When it comes to melee combat, the game is clearly trying to recreate the fun of the Batman: Arkham games and their free-flow combat, but it never quite reaches that lofty goal. You’re free to switch directions at a moment’s notice while swinging your swords, but there’s no real enemy detection or lock on system, so you’re kind of just generally slicing away in whatever direction you aim, regardless of there being a target. This can get annoying when you’re trying to kill a specific henchman in a large group of them. At least the transition from swords to guns is very smooth. There are also a few stealth kill moments, but these are largely gratuitous. It’s like the game developed a stealth kill system, but didn’t know how to implement it, so every once and while the game plops you down behind a bad guy with his back turned, and you can press a button to get a special kill animation. There’s no actual stealth in the game, but they like to pretend.

That’s right, bad guy, just stand there nice and oblivious-like

The absolute worst, most frustrating part of the Deadpool game, though, is the jumping. It’s just broken, plain and simple. Especially platform jumping. I cannot tell you how many times I screamed in frustration because the jumping just didn’t work.

It was a lot of times.

Most of the time, Deadpool could jump just fine. But when the game required you to jump from one platform to the next, it was broken. It was like each of the platforms was surrounded by invisible walls, and unless you jumped in exactly the right invisible way at exactly the right invisible time, you weren’t going to make it. Sometimes I couldn’t jump off a platform. Sometimes I couldn’t land on a platform. And sometimes I’d be mid-jump and just hit an invisible wall, sending me crashing to the ground and forcing me to redo the whole section.

This was extremely frustrating in the last level. There I was, ready to race to the climax and take on Mr. Sinister, and there was the game forcing me to jump across dozens of glitchy platforms. I had to redo these sections over and over again. I eventually made it through on luck alone, honestly.

How could they get jumping wrong? Video games mastered jumping more than two decades ago with’a Mario!

Speaking of the last level, on the build up to the final boss fight, the game ratchets up the difficulty level to the extreme. I was rarely challenged throughout the game, but suddenly the y throw an unending, unwavering tsunami of enemies at you, including recycling some of the earlier bosses, and I had to have died and retried a dozen times over just to get to the end. It killed all the excitement and momentum of the climax. By the time I finally defeated Sinister, I just wanted the game to end.

And that’s probably not the sort of attitude I should have during the big finale.

That about sums up…everything, really

Deadpool, the game, is probably the most accurate adaptation of the character we’re ever going to see. So if you love Deadpool and love video games, I highly recommend it – just don’t pay full price. Rent the game or wait for a price drop, because the game itself is either average or downright crummy in spots. And there’s no replay value whatsoever. There are no alternate costumes to unlock, no fun or hilarious cheats to activate, and I’m fairly certain the story isn’t going to change. Would it have killed them to unlock Cable as a playable character? The weapon upgrades carryover into a second playthrough, but like I said, those aren’t interesting enough on their own to warrant any extra attention.

Deadpool is a very flawed game, but it ekes by with the spot-on portrayal of its lead character. That might be enough for some people. I know if someone made a crappy game starring Multiple Man, I would be all over it! Make it happen, High Moon Studios!

Abd-abd-abd-abd-That’s all folks!