The Expendables 2: The Game

Game Info

What’s the last good video game based on a movie you’ve played?  You’re going to say Goldeneye, aren’t you?  Released in 1997, Goldeneye was to FPSs as Ray-J is to rap: it changed the game.  There was, of course, a single-player mode where you cruise through the movie (and a few scenes not in the movie), shooting bad guys, saving the girl, and chasing your evil operative ex-buddy.  But the big draw was the 4-player deathmatch, which added some brilliant stages and gunplay to the thrill of having 4 people in a room, shooting man-shaped blobs on a screen.  Yes, Goldeneye for the N64 was the last good movie-based video game I’ve played too.

The Expendables 2: The Video Game has you playing as Stallone, Lungren, Li, or Crewes as you twin-stick shoot your way through thousands of bad guys for various reasons.  Sometimes you’ll have to rescue a dude, other times you’ll have to chase a guy.  Helicopters show up and they must be destroyed.  Jason Statham is not here, and Jet Li takes over his knife-throwing skills.  Hey, remember throwing knives in Goldeneye?  It was like playing CODBLOPS ten years early – you could whip some knives and with the right arc, kill someone from the other side of the stage.  I had a buddy who was really good at doing that in Aztec – he’d stand in that little hallway connecting two of the large rooms, and watch other people’s screens.

For a 4-player bullet hell twin-stick shooter, Expendables 2 does a fair job of showing all the action.  Most of your bad guys look the same, so there’s no weird feeling that you’re killing actual people.  It is, however, zoomed out pretty far so everyone can see, making everybody very, very small.  Following your specific character throughout this tiny tiny mayhem is made even more difficult by the fact that you can switch people on the fly, and the game expects you to know the characters’ names going in to this whole fiasco.  While I could tell you most of the actors’ names, I have no idea who is who.  When did the first Expendables come out, 2010?  It’s like how Goldeneye the game came out 2 years after the movie – but everyone knows James Bond, and who could forget Famke Jannson as Xena Onatopp?

Expendables 2’s sound fares no better.  There is music sometimes, and sound effects happen.  They are of low quality.  Everything has that too-quiet feel of a rushed, unfocused cash-in that will sell on name only.  Stallone’s sound-alike enunciates too well, Jet Li is damn-near silent, and Crewes shouts through his one-take lines so quickly it’s like he was running to the door, grabbing his check as he left.  Nothing stands out, or is memorable in any way.  A rocket launcher should sound like one, ya know?  Like in Goldeneye – that short, high pitched whistle sent me running for cover every single time I heard it.  I can imagine that sound, sitting here on my couch at 4AM, like it just happened.  Usually it was followed by someone shouting “ahhh dammit” and then the death music.

Even the little mechanical things about Expendables 2 feel wrong.  Aiming is a chore due to a complete lack of any type of reticule – something Dead Nation solved over a year ago with a tiny red line.  The guns are supremely underpowered, to where a basic enemy will take 4 shotgun blasts before being defeated – but one thrown knife will kill him immediately.  There are melee attacks, which do nothing.  You’ll get a cool-looking super-melee attack every once in a while (some invisible bar needs to fill up), but you only get to do it once, and it involves holding down a button.  With so many enemies running around, targeting a single one that needs to be immediately dealt with is a huge issue by itself, but more often than not you’ll miss anyway and destroy some schmuck enemy that you could’ve dealt with using 4 shotgun blasts.  Weapons and armor are upgradable, but the costs are so high it generally takes 2 stages before you can get anything worthwhile.  There are turret sequences, too.  Great.  It’s all just a mess.  The only real redeeming quality is that the game supports 4 players, but if you can trick three dumb buddies into experiencing this game, you’d might as well just go
watch the movie it’s based on.

At $15, Expendables 2: The Video Game is an overpriced, fun-destroying slop of a game that is entirely not worth it.  It seems like the only people who would enjoy it are action movie fans who don’t play video games, and therefore don’t know any better.  This tiny demographic probably has no idea how to purchase a game on PSN Store though, so I think we’re safe in this being the only time we’ll be subjected to a crappy movie tie-in game ever again.  Don’t play this.