Deadpool

[IamLEAM1983]

Comic book protagonists that tend to be churned out by the Big Two exist in a weird and slightly contradictory situation : they're extremely serious about what they do, but also exist in a world where morbid obesity can be a superpower, where death is constantly handwaved in favor of really far-fetched bullet-dodges like alternate universes or clones of themselves being on the receiving end of said death. When they're just not faking it outright and when they don't pass their mantle onto their suddenly Mature and Gritty former sidekick, that is. Even when a character has a bit of a smart-alec streak, it's balanced out by his or her needing to confront overpowering odds of some kind. It's been said before, but part of the reasoning behind this is because superheroes are our modern-day take on Greek tragic figures. Oedipus was king but was cursed with persistent tragedy and unwanted foresight à la Cassandra's Tears, for instance, to the point where the poor fucker tore his own eyes out and forced his daughter Antigonë to stick by him while he'd amble from one end of Greece to the other, spreading his doom and gloom and general bad feels all over.

Superheroes are kinda like that, in that their curse is their usually failing at balancing their mundane life and their heroic ambitions. You can't have one or the other, and those who try either end up paying for it big time, or can't resist the Call to Adventure for more than a few consecutive issues. There was only one anti-superhero I ever heard of whose ambition was to stuff himself with Cheetos and watch bad soaps instead of using his super-brain to cure cancer, and that didn't run for much than a few issues. I remember the Wizard issue for June 1998 painted that out as being a huge deal for DC Comics but – yeah. I don't even remember the guy's name or concept, and I'm sure you don't either.

Then, of course, there's what happens when one of DC or Marvel's writers has a brilliant, if insane idea. The nineties had a few of these off-kilter antiheroes, and a few of them survived the waning of the Nevermind era and the dawn of the new millennium's early sense of postmodern apathy. There's Lobo the intergalactic biker who was tailor-made to appeal to recess-hall kids looking to gussy up their Bad Boy image, there's the Mask, a figure who used to be far more homicidal than Jim Carrey's incarnation ever ended up being, there's obviously Spawn and Jackie Estacado and pretty much everything out of Rob Liefeld's horrid stable – et cetera. On DC's more classic side, you've got the Catwoman series for a more standard take on antihero antics, while the Green Lantern remake gave us the controversial Blackest Night event from three years ago; itself introducing us to Larfleeze, keeper of the Orange Light of Avarice. He's also joined DC's roster of ineffectual villains doubling as reluctant good guys, seeing as he's essentially Ebenezer Scrooge, Gollum and Goku smushed together in a particle accelerator.

When in doubt, make Space Gonzo rediscover the True Meaning of Christmas or tearfully reminisce on his lost family for the -nth time, I guess.

Then there's Deadpool.

Wade Wilson started out as a small-time assassin whose only distinguishing trait was of being in the throes of terminal Unspecified Generic Cancer. Back when Logan was first forcefully drafted into Weapon X by Marvel's seriously fucked-up version of the Canadian military, Wilson was part of the unlucky schmoes exposed to other mutants' unique genome sequences. The aim was to reproduce Logan's healing factor and potentially create an army's worth of unbeatable clawed badass motherfuckers – but nobody had counted on what the healing factor would do to Wilson's metastases. The things began to multiply even faster, even as his organism was impossibly sustained in a state of stubborn and defiant life. Eventually turned into nothing but a walking and talking cancerous mass, Wilson's brain started to be attached by the rogue cells – even as his inherited regenerative abilities prevented him from dying. Over several cellular generations, his brain would effectively be torn apart and shoved back together multiple times, resulting in an understandably bonkers individual. Wade Wilson emerged out of Weapon X as Deadpool, Marvel's metanarrative and self-aware punchline whose hilariously lucid outlook on the comic book's proceedings passes for insanity within the Marvel-verse.

In short, Deadpool is a superhero who knows he's a superhero, who's completely aware of the idiosyncrasies of comic book conventions and who's frequently happy with the concept of throwing all sense of sanity to the wind. A difficult ascent up a booby-trapped elevator shaft à la Speed might manifest in his warped mind as a very Disney-fied climb of a giant beanstalk, and his idea of stealth seems to involve stealing a mascot's outfit. He more or less exists as a kind of walking exultory for any writer who's dead-tired of playing Pretend with increasingly convoluted storylines and who probably wants a shot at something silly, simple, self-contained and unpretentious.

Needless to say, Wade doesn't play nice with Wolverine et al. He doesn't play nice with anyone, come to think of it, and not because he isn't nice.

I mean, would you want to bunk with a guy who's okay with the idea of making an easy chair for himself out of explosive plastique, or who starts making hundreds of flapjacks just because?

Then there's the fact that video games have been wanting to play with their own tropes for years, now; but very few developers seem to have the guts to pull out a dedicated Hot Shots-alike based on the tropes and standards of video game design. The best you'll get is pokes and ribs at that concept from certain cheeky devs like Volition (see Saints Row the Third). One notable effort was Matt Hazard, but the focus on “being meta” was so strong that there was basically no content to Will Ferrell's foray into joystick-twiddling. Well, no content other than the content of other, better prepared developers, who were being pointed and winked at with the subtlety of a sledgehammer giving a goodnight kiss to a fragile glass sculpture.

Enter High Moon Studios, who gave us the surprisingly solid Transformers : Battle for Cybertron and its sequel. As the game's setup goes, Deadpool wakes up one morning and decides he wants to design a game. He commissions High Moon for a script, only to receive it in medias res and to hack it apart immediately. Whatever care to assemble a coherent story that you'd expect to find is missing here, as the script is being peer-reviewed by an insane, self-absorbed, gleeful and obviously acutely aware intelligence. This goes right down to the initial script being shown to you, onscreen, and Deadpool proceeding to red-marker the shit out of it – leaving only hilariously disjointed tatters he ties together using last-minute reveals and the general workings of his chaotic screwball nature. The game tells a terrible, terrible story – and you feel it's entirely intentional. You won't care much, either, as the game will frequently leave you grinning.

Perhaps, then, this is to be applied to the level design and gameplay. Wade isn't a gamer or a game designer – he's an assassin who's maybe lucky if he gets to mess around a console every once in a while. In any case, no matter if his influence it to blame or if High Moon was lacking in ideas, the setup is fairly bland. Dead mutants are being resurrected from the X-Men lore hotspot of Genosha, and it's up to Deadpool to save the girls, maybe save the world, ride a winged tiger over a rainbow and eat all the chimichangas. Or something. It's really hard to pay attention when you're presented with something as hyperkinetic as Nolan North's performance as the Merc With a Mouth. More on that later, but the expertly (or insanely?) penned script and North both end up saving what is otherwise a fairly humdrum action-adventure title.

So there's something like a story, sure, but how about the gameplay? That's unfortunately where things fall apart. So much effort was placed into the seriously bonkers storyline that very little seems to be carried out into what Deadpool actually does. You'll swap between strong and fast attacks with his swords or hammers, and sometimes snap to a third-person over-the-shoulder perspective for some truly ineffectual gunplay. Slashing and stabbing feels fast and reasonably responsive, but it doesn't really stray from what you'd consider to be the previous generation's superhero game mechanics.

Actually – remember the way things were done before Rocksteady opened our eyes and rocked our minds with the Arkham games? Loose controls, tons of bugs, meh execution and feh production values?

Yeah. High Moon did a commendable job, but you can clearly tell Marvel didn't have much faith in the project. You slash at bad guys and it feels rote and basically okay, then switch to your guns and wonder why they even bothered including them, seeing as Deadpool is no Dante or Vergil; the level designs all feel very 2005 in their execution, with office being offices and supervillain bases looking like the absolute-barest minimum of supervillainy... With the game being divided into chapters, you're also stuck on a linear path – something which I'd assumed Arkham City had done away with for at least one or two generations.

At the same time, the subject matter never strays too far. What if the reason why Genosha doesn't look like Genosha is because it's being seen through Deadpool's skewed sense of place? What if the samey and uninspired looks for the various locations are more a testament to the fact that Wade Wilson is a killer-for-hire and mostly a non-gamer? If he doesn't know how to make a place feel believable or interesting from a game design perspective, doesn't it make sense for the final product to look underwhelming?

You can wrack your brain with that comic-book diegetic and philosophical nonsense for quite a while, only to be confronted with the rare nugget of brilliance. Whoops, there's that level over here; it looks like a top-down Legend of Zelda rip-off! Hey, there's that other level, and it looks like a side-scrolling platformer à la oldschool Prince of Persia! You definitely get the sense that High Moon knew what their project's strengths and weaknesses were and that they tried their hardest to compensate for the sore spots.

That brings us to what will actually get you to keep playing; Deadpool himself. Nolan North's been voicing him for a few years now, and he consistently aims for something that feels like someone rammed the Adventure and Space Cores from Portal 2 together. Marvel's cheeky mutant is hyperactive, has a very clear attention deficit disorder, is brash, crude, rude, juvenile and nonsensical – and yet always manages to cobble something out of his personal brand of insanity. Nolan North sells us the feeling of a guy who's running on an endless adrenaline bender and who has THE motor mouths to end all motor mouths – sometimes to the point of adding his own “Pew pew pew!” and “Bang bang!” mouth noises over his gunshots. The script pays reverent service to the character's on-page or printed dementia, with several captions showing up during cinematics or gameplay, furthering the impression that Wilson is forced to live in with several resident personalities.

Considering the character's tone, you can forget your immediate image of a guy crying out about “THE VOICES!” as it would be more appropriate to say Wade Wilson's head is probably a Saturday-afternoon sitcom. He's not tortured in the slightest, and tends to have something of a Mad Hatter-with-two-katanas feel, the way he goes on talking with himself (or with his Selves, if you wanna see it that way). Deadpool, in and of himself, is the one and only draw to this game, to be absolutely honest. You'll keep playing because you'll be wanting to see which stupid brain-fart he'll produce next, and absolutely not because the combo engine is deep or the gunplay is rewarding.

They really aren't. In a way, that's a huge compliment paid to the voice cast, which does a tremendous job at balancing out North's gleeful and slightly homicidal antics – that sometimes echo the best of Jim Carrey's comedic roles. Steve Blum is a perfect Wolverine, same as ever, and Grey Delisle is a great Rogue, piling up just enough Southern Belle charm to fit the character's origins. Of course, both tend to act as straight-men to Deadpool's insanity, consistently denying the video gamey nature of their proceedings and treating the sacking of Genosha as Very Serious Business.

Which is needed, as Deadpool without any sort of counterweight tends to get old fast. Funnymen need their straight men, just as the Three Stooges couldn't work in settings where everything acknowledged their combined stupidity.

Otherwise? Eh. There's no multiplayer, and at forty bucks a pop that is no surprise to anyone. Instead we get a set of challenge maps that simply reuse elements of the single-player campaign to help you unlock mercenary perks and levels. You can sit through the entire campaign in one go, as it clocks at a little under eight hours, and you'll have precious little incentive to restart a playthrough afterwards. Unless, of course, Daniel Way's writing and North's performance wowed you to such an extent that you don't mind going through the same gags a second or third time. I've always been a Deadpool fan, so I'll probably hang onto my installed copy for a few months longer, just in case a rainy day or two shows up.

Of course, I'm saying that knowing that comedy doesn't tend to do well under repeated exposures. If you pick this up on Steam, don't expect to get dozens and dozens of nonstop play time out of this.

So is it worth it? It is – if you're a fan of the Daniel Way series or of Deadpool in general. If you haven't been initiated to his high-octane and ultraviolent whimsy before and are coming at this from the perspective of just another El Cheapo summertime actioner, you might be disappointed. It's a buy for fans only, and a cautious rental for everyone else – at least in my book.

Now if you'll excuse me, I just ordered a shit-ton of Semtex off of a military supplier and I'll try to shape it into something that vaguely resembles the Mona Lisa... I think that'd make a nice statement about the military-industrial complex.