Deadpool Review

Deadpool talks a big game but delivers a standard action experience that is the turducken of videogame parody: It is what it parodies what it is.

Playing through Deadpool feels about as schizophrenic as its main character. On the one hand, it’s zany, wacky, goofy, silly, sophomoric, and many more adjectives that Thesaurus.com suggests. This is a funny game – that is, if you’re into dick jokes and casual sexism. If not, then Deadpool – the character and the game – will grate on you like a buzzsaw on hard cheese.

On the other hand, much of the Deadpool gameplay experience is formulaic and safe…so safe you might think developer High Moon Studios is playing some sort of self-referential “hey, isn’t it ironic how normal this is?” meta-gag on you. But it’s not. No, Deadpool talks a big game but delivers a standard action experience that is the turducken of videogame parody: It is what it parodies what it is.

For those not familiar with the glory of the one and only “Merc with a Mouth,” the spandex-clad Deadpool is himself a parody of an anti-hero. A mainstay of Marvel Comics, he was given a healing factor by the Weapon X boys (the same ones who adamantium-ized Wolverine) in an experimental procedure that left him certifiably insane – and self-aware that he is in fact a comic book character. For that reason, Deadpool also knows he’s a videogame character. In fact, he starts the story – what little there is – by forcing High Moon to make a game about him and then throws out the script it sends over to him for approval. It’s a fittingly insane approach that’s true to Deadpool’s character, even if it doesn’t make for a strong story.

Armed with guns, katanas, and an unhealthy love for chimichangas, Deadpool pokes fun at videogame clichés and tropes almost as much as he pokes bad guys with sharp objects. It’s pretty obvious that Deadpool’s writers had a blast bringing this character into interactive 3D; he regularly has arguments with the voices in his head, and at one point can hop on word bubbles emanating from his diseased mind to cross a toxic river. At one point, you can even instigate a creepy stalker situation between a dialogue tree option and yourself. It’s pretty inventive, clever stuff that’s made even more enjoyable by Nolan North’s very enthusiastic delivery as the voice of Deadpool.

But then there’s the little matter of the repetitive gameplay. In pseudo Batman-style, you can chain together combos with a mix of melee and shooting combat that, while not exactly bad, starts off uninteresting and grows more stale the longer you play. It can be fun slicing into a henchman one second before finishing him off with a shotgun blast to the head, but there’s not enough variety in attacks and tougher enemies can seem unreasonably resistant to your relentless hacking.

The higher the combo chain, the more DP points you’ll earn. These can be spent on purchasing new weapons (shotguns, sledgehammers, grenades, bear traps, etc.) or on upgrades to existing ones. But few of these options really change up the gameplay – most only enhance damage and make enemies take fewer hits. It’s a perfunctory upgrade system and doesn’t exactly stretch the creative grey matter. This is Deadpool we’re talking about here! Why so serious?
Deadpool is also armed with a teleportation device that lets him *bampf* short distances like Nightcrawler, which can be useful for dodging attacks or making a quick escape when cornered. The downside is that the teleport button is the same one that appears over an opponent’s head to trigger a special combo; get the timing wrong and you may zap behind him instead of hitting him. Teleporting in tight spaces can be especially disorienting because of the close camera perspective, with enemies suddenly off-camera and you not knowing exactly where you are in relation to them.

Another annoyance is the lock-on targeting button for gunplay. It works most of the time, but sometimes pressing it will lock onto a spot just to the side of a target’s fleshy, perforate-able bits. When a bunch of identical bad guys rush into a room to charge you – and they will, repeatedly - the last thing you want to do is waste precious time re-targeting their melons.

But where Deadpool really doesn’t surprise is in its level design. In a game that’s a send-up of videogames, you’d expect to see an office level, a sewer level, a jungle level, etc, but you’d also expect these chestnuts to be turned on their metaphorical heads with a design that skewers your expectations. Instead, each of these visually uninteresting levels is played relatively straight. Sure, there are the occasional unexpected non sequiturs (Deadpool gets sucked into an 8-bit dungeon crawler, Deadpool hallucinates a scene in LittleBigPlanet-style graphics); it’s just that these bits are handed out like treats for slogging through the comparatively lackluster levels.

Some later levels do show some more imagination, especially when Death herself (a frequent love interest for Deadpool) submits him to a series of introspective challenges to test his worth. In one set up like a theme park ride, he has to shoot cardboard cutouts of the demons escaping from his own fractured psyche before they can destroy him. It’s stuff like that I wish there was more of.

Because the Big Bad is Mr. Sinister, a supervillain with a penchant for cloning, Deadpool the game is chock-full of samey-looking bad guys. And I have to question Sinister’s choice of cloning subjects, because he apparently picked the dumbest available henchman. Some weakly attempt to take cover, but most just stand in front of you and shoot. Even the boss battles against supervillains are dull and repetitive, not to mention pretty easy. The winning strategy is to run away to recharge health and shoot from a distance while teleporting to dodge charges and power attacks.

Lastly, Deadpool is almost nearly devoid of secrets and collectibles: a huge disappointment for a game that parodies videogames and stars a superhero. If you’re expecting to unlock alternate costumes, comic book pages, or really anything that’ll entice you into replaying the 10 or so hours of action a second or third time, you’ll be a sad puppy. Once you play through the linear campaign, the only reason to keep the disc around is to play the Challenge Mode levels, which are merely a series of survival modes set in the same levels you just played through.