The Expendables 2 Videogame Review

When you and your bros go to watch The Expendables 2, the goofy Willis/Schwarzenegger/Van Damme trailers will have prepped you for what to expect: explosions, one-liners and cheese. When you go to play The Expendables 2 Videogame, the goofy title screen with its low-res text and lackluster animations will have prepped you for what to expect: explosions, a Stallone sound-a-like, and a four-player shooter that's just mediocre.

Through four chapters packing drop-in/drop-out online/offline co-op, The Expendables 2 casts you in the roles made famous by Sly Stallone, Jet Li, Terry Crews and Dolph Lundgren. Each character has a different armament (a pistol, SMG, shotgun and sniper rifle, respectively), and it's up to you to take them from Point A to Point B killing everything that moves (also known as enemies who are all dressed the same).

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The Expendables 2 just doesn't click as a package.

It's your standard top-down arcade shooter. Rather than picking up power-ups, you pick up AKs and rocket launchers. There are collectable Expendables icons that fill in a meter and let you pull off Signature Kills, where the camera zooms in and shows your character impressively slitting a throat or blowing a dude away from pointblank range. Sometimes, you climb in a helicopter and shoot at ground troops via an onscreen reticle.

And then, you repeat this. Over and over again. If you're just looking to blow stuff up, it isn't a bad time; it just isn't an impressive time. The voice acting will make you chuckle (though Crews and Lundren lend their pipes), the story is non-existent, and the action turns to chaos in huge fights. Whereas Dead Nation and other top-down shooters put a laser sight on every weapon, The Expendables 2 doesn't. Stallone's shots just fly off into the distance; they're helped towards enemies in that direction, but picking off enemies on top of train cars and in elevated towers can be troublesome when you're on the ground.

However, that's really only an issue if you're playing on the Hardcore difficulty. Casual difficulty is nerfed to the point that I'd just run into the middle of enemy groups and start meleeing without a care in the world. On Hardcore, you're taken down quickly if you don't use cover, but taking cover feels weird in a run and gun arcade shooter.

The carrot on the end of the stick is that The Expendables 2 gets easier as you play. You kill stuff and earn XP that you can spend on upgrades for your weapons and attributes; but even these are basic and unsexy. If you want to throw an additional $3 into the game, you can max out all the characters before you even fire your first shot.

In-game, The Expendables 2 looks fine -- it's a bit barren when it comes to environments and textures -- but the general package and ambiance feels so cheap. All the fonts used for text in this game are jaggy, and the menu system has no flair. This is the most rudimentary looking game in terms of presentation I've played in my 5 and a half years at IGN.

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