The Expendables 2 Review
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Movie-licensed games have rarely, if ever, been any good. Due to the rising price of development costs, many of these quickly thrown together cash grabs have transitioned from full retail releases to downloadable only. The Expendables 2 is another such licensed game that despite being downloadable feels just as mediocre, derivative and ill-conceived as the D list retail titles of yesteryear.
At its core, The Expendables 2 is a dual joystick shooter. The game has a kind of always-on four player co-op in which the player is able to switch between characters at will while playing solo or each character can be played by a different player simultaneously. As I started the game, Renegade Ops came immediately to mind. After completing the game, I can say that that is a fairly apt comparison if you ratchet the graphics down several notches, slow the pace considerably, make almost all of the gun fighting entirely unsatisfying, and lose any real sense of UI design. Now that I think about it, they aren’t all that similar.
Each player chooses one of the game’s four characters before a level, upgrades them with experience gained in previous levels with things like faster reload speeds on specific weapons or the ability to take more damage. You then go into the level where you push the right stick in the direction of enemies and mash the right trigger for ten minutes until enemies stop streaming out of off-screen spawn points. That’s a reasonable summation of the entire game from start to finish.
Most dual joystick shooters are fun either because of their breakneck pace or the satisfying feel of the shooting. Modern games like Geometry Wars and Renegade Ops are proof that the formula still works and can even keep things fresh over the course of a lengthy campaign in certain cases. In The Expendables 2, none of the shooting feels good. I played the game primarily as Gunner who is armed with a sawed-off shotgun and sniper rifle. Both weapons were equally frustrating. The game doesn’t really allow free aiming. Instead, it has a kind of sluggish lock on system. With the sniper rifle, it was hard to know if I was going to actually hit someone before firing and impossible at many points in the game to actually switch targets to the enemy I was hoping to kill. At those moments, all I was really able to do was just keep mashing the trigger until the game had decided which enemies I was firing at and killed them all.
All of the game’s weapons, except for a few of the limited use pickups, feature extremely small clip sizes. With my sniper rifle, I had a single shot (until much later in the game after several upgrades). My shotgun has two shots before requiring a lengthy reload. Only one of the character’s weapons was somewhat satisfying to shoot but when coupled with an extreme reload time and the sloth-like pace the character used to switch between his two weapons made it just as frustrating.
You would think for a game based on a film that story or character may be of some importance here. Sadly, that is not the case. While very little is mentioned overall regarding why the characters are actually doing what they are doing (killing thousands upon thousands of people), I was able to glean that the Expendables are trying to track down a hostage that they have been offered one million dollars to rescue. Tracking down this hostage leads the characters across a number of similar looking generic “bad” countries, places like Somalia for example.
For a movie (and game) that relies almost solely on the number of big name actors and action stars in it, the game does a very poor job of leveraging any of the iconic cast members. Only Terry Crews and Dolph Lundgren actually did their voice acting, and there is so little of it, it doesn’t really matter. Sadly, Barney (Sylvester Stallone) has the most lines out of anyone. The Stallone impression being done by the voice actor is so bad that it is hardly even recognizable as an impression. Jet Li’s character Yin Yang speaks rarely which is good considering the faux voice acting for him comes across as someone doing their best Asian stereotype.
Across the campaign’s four chapters, there are a number of on-rails shooter sequences that are so flabbergastingly old-fashioned that the only thing my mind could relate them to was the dreadful Aerosmith-inspired lightgun game Revolution X which I played on the Sega Genesis as a child. Playing it without a lightgun was a terrible and inaccurate experience that led to either extreme frustration or ultimate apathy depending on the difficulty of the level, and the exact same thing is true here. Using either of the analog sticks on the controller, the player moves a crosshair around the screen and fires at enemies with either a machine gun or rocket launcher. When playing online with other players, you only see your own crosshair, bullets, and rockets. As such, things are exploding and dying for seemingly no reason. These are clearly the worst moments in an already not-good game and why they felt the need to include them at all is beyond me. Even worse, the game’s grand finale is one of these on-rails sequences. It’s just baffling.
The Expendables 2 is a dreadfully boring and absolutely frustrating gaming experience. Between killing literally hundreds, if not thousands, of cookie cutter henchmen, getting one shot killed by some enemies seemingly at random to being impervious to the vast majority of gunfire in the game and the awkward, slow controls, I found myself wanting to rush through each level as quickly as possible (since so many areas seem to spawn enemies infinitely until you just run past or complete an unclear objective). On the off chance the entire team would go down and the mission would be failed, it was rarely from my own mistakes but rather from my AI companions glitching out, taking damage despite being hidden behind cover or any number of other gameplay inconsistencies or failings.
When all was said and done, The Expendables 2 took only about four hours to complete and a grueling four hours it was. The design seems to be shooting for replayability but I can see little reason (or desire) to ever visit this one again.