The linearity of play, lack of puzzles, and limited opportunities to die make this feel more like an interactive story than a game. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it is something to be aware of. Once you get past the poorly animated opening scene of the mother drowning (a hand-drawn still, like they used in Bastion, would have been better than the clumsy use of the Unreal engine), the game mechanic of controlling two characters is both fun and clever. There are some optional things to do in this very short game/story, but the GOG version lacks the achievements of the Steam version (though the Achievements menu option is still there) and without recognition that you "did something" these moments just become tangents to the quest to save your sick father rather than game elements. Also, there is no gravitas to dying, which is a real missed opportunity considering the type of game/story this is. A simple cutscene, even if only words, rather than automatically loading the last checkpoint when you die, something like "...and so the brothers joined their mother in the afterlife, and without medicine, their father soon followed" would have enhanced the playing experience. Overall, Brothers is enjoyable experience, and I'd certainly buy a sequel, but for the few hours of "gameplay", don't it at full price.
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.
