Expendable

With almost no story to speak of, and an intro/ending that is simply going for humour. Expendable is nothing more than an arcade shooter. Pure simple mindless carnage and blowing stuff up. In fact, there is not much more to say than if you like arcade shooters, it's well worth the $6 for a couple of hours entertainment. Graphically, it has aged very well. Colourful landscapes and explosions are constant, though a few areas are traditional muddy brown and the game is mostly low poly, for a 1999 title it remains quite pretty. It is sometimes hard to tell one item from another, but you'll run through enemies quick enough it's not a worry and key items will re-spawn if you need them. In game cut-scenes show various happenings, that open new paths and in some cases, deform the terrain a little. These are usually triggered by checkpoints, and are a neat little extra. Musically, there is not much there aside from the generic techno action-beat, but the sound of weapons firing and enemies battle-cry and exploding has sufficient oomph to it. Finally, there is a two player option. It's worth at least one person controlling via a gamepad, rather both on the keyboard. Both players are governed by arcade cabinet rules; credits, lives and continues. But you can save the game after every level. However, there are two very large negatives that do need a mention. 1) Occasionally, your guy will get stuck in the geometry. This usually happens with the door-like floating impassable walls you encounter. It's best to avoid them unless you have sufficient keys to make them vanish (and this is made obvious on how to do so in the first few levels). At this option, there is no real solution but to die and/or restart the level. The 17 levels themselves are fairly short to speedrun, so thankfully it does not take much to return to where you were. 2) The camera system. The guy handles like a car, and turns relative to how he is facing, rather the camera. This itself is easy to grasp, however the camera itself is not. Rather than choosing one particular style, it jumps between locked down and unmoving, following your guy 3rd person and changing it's angle as you move. There is no warning, and suddenly it can jump from one to the other. Unless your familiar with this type of camera/games it's going to prove highly annoying until you learn to handle the quirks.

A very nice game that suffers from the worst controls I ever seen. What a pity.

Twin stick shooter long before that term was used to describe game of that type. I understand the game has its age, but playing it with original control setup is nightmare. It really needs controller support. Apart from that its a very nice game.

I had this game on the Dreamcast and enjoyed it a lot. This version looks the same and sounds the same, but the controls are awful and nearly ruin the experience.