Deadpool breaks the fourth-wall like he breaks faces: violently and unapologetically. It’s the most striking aspect of the first game to star the Merc with a Mouth as its lead character. Until now he’s always appeared in supporting roles, gently mocking video game conventions. In Marvel vs. Capcom 3: Fate of Two Worlds, for instance, he could dismantle the health bar suspended above his head and use it as a weapon to beat his opponent with.
So far he’s only toyed with such tropes. But now, finally pushed front and centre stage, Deadpool is able to take on some of those trite conventions. His sardonic swagger is present right from the game’s amusing menu screen. Suddenly, Deadpool’s masked face appears alongside the standard options to start a new game or load an existing one. He’s really close, his distinctive eyes blinking, pressing against the screen. He moves back a few steps, and starts to tap the glass of your television set, before asking, “Hey, got any girls in there?”
He knows he's in a video game, and is acutely aware of the gender breakdown that his game will potentially attract. And that’s exactly how it’s being described – it’s Deadpool’s game. Even Sean Miller (the game’s actual director) presents it as Wade Wilson's own creation. Deadpool knows that you’re sat there with a controller in your hands.
All we’ve seen of the game so far has been to some footage in the Comic Con announcement trailer. Today at Gamescom I got to see an early demo of a level in the game. It was still very much a work in progress – some animations still needed fine tuning and the HUD wasn’t finalised – but it already looked good and surprisingly polished.
Deadpool knows that you’re sat there with a controller in your hands.
The mission set-up is quite generic, but you get the feeling that’s an intentional decision. The level's opening cutscene finds Deadpool in his unhygienic apartment, draped in an armchair, scratching his crotch with a gun. He’s accepted a mission to assassinate a corrupt media mogul, whose television channel produces such quality programming as “Jump the Shark”, in which ‘celebrities’ must literally jump over a tank of water containing a ravenous great white shark.
So far, so knowing, and this extends to the gameplay itself.
The mission starts with Deadpool in a sewer beneath mogul’s high-rise building. It’s a basically a tutorial level, presenting Deadpool with an irresistible opportunity to directly address you, the player. He tells you to press ‘A’ to jump. And when presented with the right combination of platforms, he wearily suggests the novel idea of ‘wall jumping’. He never shuts up. He’s a medically diagnosed psychotic, and has multiple voices rattling around his head. You hear them interacting constantly, vying for his attention. Miller describes it as having “the three stooges in your head”.
Players will be presented with the choice either to reattach severed limbs or wait for them to regrow.
As always, it’s hard to really know how good the combat is without going hands-on with the game. But it relies heavily on using the character’s trademark arsenal of swords and guns, as well as giving players the option to equip more irregular weapons like sledgehammers. From this demo it wasn't really clear how his superhuman abilities would come into play. Like Wolverine, Deadpool possesses an accelerated healing factor. It’s promised that in the final game Deadpool will slowly fall apart as he sustains damage, similar to the protagonist in Konami's Neverdead. Players will be presented with the choice either to reattach severed limbs or wait for them to regrow. You can imagine the former as a way to quickly restore health, though this wasn’t confirmed. His ability to teleport has yet to be mentioned, too.
Probably the strongest aspect of the demo I saw was Deadpool’s extensive knowledge of popular culture and the game’s intertextual playfulness. He struts while humming Michael Jackson’s Smooth Criminal as he breaks into the building of his intended target. He quotes Star Trek (“Make it so number one”) and Star Wars (“I’ve got a bad feeling about this”) within seconds of each other. The best allusion, however, belonged to the menu screen. Select a new game, and you hear something very familiar slowly fade in – the distinctive percussion of the Terminator theme tune starts to thump, as Deadpool is lowered down, presumably into the game, and as he is about to disappear offscreen, he raises his arm and gives a thumbs up. It’s a touching and wry tribute to the noble T-800.
Given the game’s fondness for allusion, the decision to cast Nolan North makes perfect sense. Not only has he played the character before but his vocal ubiquity in video games – he’s the voice of Nathan Drake, Desmond in Assassin’s Creed, and so many others – fits perfectly with the game’s metafictional aspirations. The game looks like a lot of fun but ultimately the writing will have to be pitch-perfect to make Deadpool a success. If it strays too frequently, becoming more crass than clever, it could easily fall into the trap of becoming the kind of game it’s attempting to parody.
Daniel is IGN's UK Staff Writer. You can be part of the world's worst cult by following him on IGN and Twitter.
Source : ign[dot]com
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