Last year, Rage Software released a game called "Incoming". It
was extremely simplistic in that you had to shoot all Alien Craft
and that was it really, but it was all done with beautiful graphics
and it actually turned out to be a great game. Rage then decided
to continue this trend with "Hostile Waters" (still in development)
and "Expendable". Both push your graphics card to the extreme.
The story is virtually nonexistent, as the introduction shows, you
are a newly created marine dropped onto an alien world, and you
have to kill everything. That?s basically it for the storyline.
No matter, because all you need to do is start playing the game
and you will instantly forget everything about the storyline as your
eyes linger over the beautiful environment you get dropped into
the first mission. The graphics are just absolutely gorgeous. Since
Incoming, Rage must have happily been beavering away at all the
new features they could possible cram into Expendable, to make
the most tasty combination of bright sparkly colours, big guns and
baddies. On my 333Mhz Celeron, 64MB RAM and TNT Creative
Blaster 16MB, I could run it well at 1024x768, obtaining smooth
frames even when explosions are about everywhere and 3D
Lighting effects are doing their job.
The basic objective then, in all 20 missions, is to walk around and
shoot all and sunder. As you walk around and blast things you will
start noticing how the power-ups work. You pick up different types
of weapons, picking up multiple weapons of the same type just
gives you more ammo, and the more ammo you got, the more
powerful that weapon is, simple as that! You also get a few
different types of grenades though, but I find them relatively
useless as they don't seem to do much damage and their blast
radius couldn't cover more than a one-inch radius. There is
another bad thing to point out here though, for some reason you
are limited to being able to carry only three weapons at a time. It
will replace your weapon if the new one is more powerful than the
current one, but it does not count any power-ups your current
weapon has. This means that your current almighty upgraded
yellow laser weapon might be replaced by some new weapon that
is "basically" more powerful, but without upgrades is relatively
useless. This is another niggle in Expendable, it means you have
to be careful about what you pick up and what you are armed
with, or risk loosing your best gun. As you walk around blasting
alien scum away, you will notice many times that there are fancy
effects like Pillars falling over the road or some power lines falling
over and exploding. In the very beginning there is an excellent
scene where you walk into a small canyon, "Incoming!" prints at
the top of the screen, and your stare in awe as a huge Chassis of a
tank hurls through the canyon and comes to a stop right before you
(provided you decided to move out of its hurling path), then a
Pillar of some sort topples over onto it and everything blows up.
There are also some small in-game cutscenes sprinkled throughout
some levels. In one level for example, you see this huge plane
getting shot out of the sky, and it crashes right beside you in a big
explosion. So the game has absolutely gorgeous graphics, and
you walk around and shoot things, it might sound a tad boring you
might think, but I can safely assure you that if you have "any" sort
of liking for blowing things up, you will love this game. It has
somehow struck this almost perfect balance of weapons, bad guys
and ammo that just makes this game so much fun. It?s a classic
arcade design of blasting things away, and then at the end of each
level you have to fight a boss character, which is usually
extremely hard to beat. There are 20 levels, which might perhaps
not sound like an awful lot, but the difficulty curve and the sizes of
the levels easily make up for this. As I progressed through, I started
finding it rather hard to pass even Level 6 without using a rather
large number of lives. This doesn't actually cause much frustration
though, as I just decided to replay Level 1 again and calm myself
by happily blowing everything away without a scratch to myself,
then having another go at the current level I was stuck on.
Expendable's sound is nicely done, with explosion, gun noises and
alien grunts all contributing to the generally, very noisy
environment with a fitting techno soundtrack blasting away in the
background to recreate that real arcade machine feel. No
complaints here.
The controls in Expendable are very basic, a Gamepad would be
recommended for this type of game, but I myself, being deprived
of such a luxury, made do with just the keyboard, or a keyboard +
Mouse combo, there is no real difference in accuracy between the
two at all though. There is one really irritating niggle with
Expendable, the moving about part. As you turn your character left
and right, initially your character won't budge for a split second,
then he swerves about 90 degrees or more to what-ever direction
your were pointing. At times you will find that pointing your gun
where you want it to is virtually impossible, and at hectic times,
you will have to revert to madly doing 360-degree circles and firing
away. The tactic I reverted to in the end is just doing minuscule
movements of the mouse, and then when I need to sweep fire from
left to right, just fire straight forward and strafe from left to right. It
still makes it very irritating sometimes though when you need that
one power-up quickly whilst your character madly swerves around
in circles and refuses to instantly respond to your strafe
commands. Apart from this irritating fault though, the controls are
great for this sort of game, with a minimum amount of keys so as
not to confuse you (as some simple arcade games try to do).
Expendable also offers the option of having two players on screen
at once. Its very simple, you and your buddy just press Fire and
you're in, happily blasting away together. There is nothing much to
say about this, except that it?s a whole lot of fun, and it can make
those later levels easier to pass if you and your buddy are both
relatively good.
Expendable feels sort of like your own shiny arcade machine at
home, much better than all those other shoot 'em up machines you
will find at the arcades and it doesn't cost you any money either
(except the initial cost). Meaning you and your buddy can rattle
away on your machine for as long as you want, shooting away,
yelling for your buddy to keep his dirty hands off *your* power-ups
and yelling out at those big end bosses to get stuffed and die
already. I do hope they make an Arcade Machine out of this game
somehow, it should be a smashing success compared to the
current shoot 'em ups out there.
Highs
Absolutely Gorgeous graphics
Excellent Replayability
Great Fun with a buddy!
Lows
If you don't like blowing things up then forget about it
Not much variation
Movement is irritating
18/20
12/15
25/30
18/20
5/5
8/10