Expendable

Expendable is a (mostly) vertical scrolling shooter that allows you to rotate the character Ikrai Warriors style to shoot in any direction, but "up" moves the character in the direction he is facing, not towards the top of the screen; so if you've rotated towards the bottom of the screen to shoot aliens coming from behind, pressing "up" will move your character down and strafing left will move the character to the right. For the most part, you can get by with strafing instead of rotating, but there are times when you will need to wrestle with the controls to shoot in a direction other than up while still trying to advance towards the top of the screen. Bonus areas in particularly require you to scroll well off to either side of the screen, and sometimes the camera rotates for no good reason which gives you no choice but to advance sideways. Granted, the game predates dual-stick controllers so it's lack of right-stick support is understandable, so why then didn't they simply use Commando-style controls for moving and shooting? Expendable could have been a great game if it had any kind of fixed-axis control scheme but, as it is, it's not nearly as fun as it could have been.

What a dumb game, but it's a lot of fun. It's as video gamey as a game from the late 90's could get. Loud soundeffects populated with shouting, grunts, explosions and a pumping electronic soundtrack. All you need to know is that it's a very solid arcade experience for the PC. And yes, it is drop-in co-op. One thing however that really kinda sucks about this: Tank controls. I'm usually fine with tank controls in games like Resident Evil. But in a fast paced shoot 'em up, it's a real problem. Going from something like Apocalypse on PS1, good ol' Robotron or Smash TV to this is very jarring. Despite that though, it's pretty good. Give it a go.

This should be way more fun: shoot everything, grab every powerup, repeat. The graphics are fine, the fps is smooth, sound effects and music are muddy but still serviceable. The controls are what bring this down from the mindless blast it's aiming for; the PC movement is slow and feels like you're walking through glue (especially whilst walking sideways), while your weapon movement is ridiculously fast. This results in an endless cycle of having to over correct yourself as you play and, while the controls don't completely ruin the game, they certainly reduce the enjoyment level. That's one star gone. The second star gets removed because of all the cheap, unavoidable deaths that are triggered as you progress, usually in the form of an unexpected, giant vehicle careening towards you and exploding. The only way to avoid many of these is to die and restart, remembering where they get triggered. This is a cheap way to add "difficulty" and play length. If you have special memories of playing Expendable, then it runs fine and should deliver the experience you remember. All others should know that it's not a disaster, just mediocre. If you have the money, it's worth the budget price of $6 (U.S.), but there are much better shooters around.

Standard (decent) PSX-era top-down shooter, unfortunately unplayable due to the terrible controls (the demo had twin-stick controls and was awesome, this version has tank controls which perform very badly). Would be good mindless fun, but I don't feel like devoting half the playtime to controls hassle. Repeat: IF YOU LOVED THE DEMO, AVOID THIS VERSION! PS: If anyone knows a way to switch this crap to the twin-stick scheme or KB+M with separate moving and aiming, tell me and I'll gladly play this.

The game is unplayable without a joystick! WASTE OF MONEY!