As a postscript to my playing all the movie mutant games, I picked up Deadpool. It’s not bad!
I didn’t care too much for the Deadpool movie; the second one though had more heart, more stakes, and more humour that landed for me. This game is like a middle ground between the two. In terms of continuity it’s divorced from the film universes; anyway, at the time the only film Deadpool we had was the odd Wolverine Origins one. This game may have been intended to tie in to the Deadpool film in development, although it was shelved for a few years, but they did end up making this next-gen port a few years later to tie in to the eventual release of the film.
Anyway. This is a hack n slash n shoot, with lots of jokes, questionable or otherwise. The combat is pretty good, with a few different options and super meters and lots of upgrades. I found the hammers the most effective and satisfying, paired with the machine guns for range. It’s pretty fluid with counters and such, and varied with tiers of cloned soldiers and mutation-enhanced troops being filtered in over the course of the game.
The plot involves Deadpool taking on Mister Sinister and his many clone selves, plus a handful of Marauders for boss fights. The X-Men (Wolverine, Rogue, Psylocke, and Domino) and Cable are tangentially involved. After a sewer level and a fancy high-rise you spend most of the game in post-Sentinel-holocaust Genosha, fighting through ruined buildings and plazas etc. before descending to ancient stone catacombs and meeting Death (which surprisingly leads to Deadpool’s most human moments of connection with another character). It’s not incredibly long but that’s ok, and the fighting is often broken up by jokey cutscenes, platforming, surreal moments, and otherwise tongue-in-cheek gameplay interludes.
As with the films, the humour can be hit or miss. When the joke is “Deadpool is a misogynist” or “Deadpool is an egotistical sociopath” or “swearing” (which is often) I couldn’t care less, but I did get some chuckles at other times. The game often pokes fun of game conventions, or itself, which is occasionally amusing (cheap props, lack of budget necessitating paper cut-out cutscenes). Deadpool’s interactions with others are usually tiresome, crudely debased leering or name-calling, but him zoning out when Cable is trying to explain the game’s plot is fun. I also want to call out one gag where henchmen are conspicuously over-explaining the function of a lever to clue the player in to their next objective. I liked that.
Some other minor notable things: Deadpool’s dialogue with more serious and childlike inner voices works well, and there’s a similar “body damage that heals in real time” system that Wolverine Origins had (HD only). There’s also challenge maps that are just battle waves, but I didn’t pursue them. The campaign itself was pretty satisfying if you can swallow any humour that doesn’t agree with you. The main problem is getting a hold of the game; Activision’s licence expired and it’s been digitally delisted, so you have to get a physical copy second hand. Their online servers have also been shut down, so when it does an online check every thirty seconds that fails every time, the game freezes for a second or so, which is a real drag. Therefore it’s very important if you play that you disconnect your device from the Internet, which will fix that. Don’t say I never do anything for ya!