The Expendabros is a free run-and-gun video game based on BroForce and The Expendables 3, meant to promote both properties.
Story
YouThe Expendabros is a free run-and-gun video game based on BroForce and The Expendables 3, meant to promote both properties.
Story
You are trying to free your bros and kill the bad guy. The story is barely mentioned and is very clearly an excuse plot.
Gameplay
The game is a fairly standard run-and-gun type game in some respects; you control a character, you have a very limited number of attacks but a variety of possible attack sets, in this game represented by different characters instead of different weapons, and there are explosive barrels around in the environment which can be used to destroy enemies. Somewhat unusually for the genre, the terrain in the game is fully destructible, meaning that everything except for checkpoints, ladders, and a few steel blocks which are distributed in some parts of some levels can be destroyed.
On the downside, the enemies are very stupid and only attack when you get close to them; the trouble is that while they kill you in one hit, most of the time they can be rather easily killed without them even having the opportunity to shoot. This makes the game quite easy overall, and apart from a few missile turrets and a couple bosses, there isn’t much variation in the opposition. The AI is also quite dumb and won’t really pursue the player at all, which means that retreat is very frequently easy.
There are a number of characters in the game, each with their own unique moveset – a normal attack, which has unlimited ammo, and a special attack, which is use-limited to varying amounts by different characters. Ammunition can be picked up in the levels to recharge your ammunition, and you can switch characters by finding a captured character in the level and rescuing them, at which point you switch to a different random character you have unlocked. This is both interesting and annoying, because these allies also constitute “lives”, switching you to a new random bro at the last checkpoint if you die. As you start out each stage with a single life, it is generally wise to save all the people you can, but this also means sometimes you’ll be switched to a character with an inferior moveset – in particular, the knife-using character and the minigun toting character were generally the worst, the knife-using character due to sharply limited range while the minigun toting character suffered from knockback from using his basic attack and a difficult-to-control special ability which oftentimes missed enemies, leaving them alive to kill you.
On the whole, while I really enjoyed the idea behind the characters, I didn’t really feel like the actual core gameplay of killing enemies was as good as it was in games like Contra.
Graphics
The game has very 8-bit graphics and in actual gameplay looks quite ugly. The cutscenes are made to look like 16-bit era cutscenes and look nice enough.
There are overtones of comedy in the game, but unfortunately it is very sparse; it only appears from time to time, and the shouting, overexcited narrator, while funny at first, actually gets kind of boring after a while.
Final Summary
While the game has an amusing aesthetic, and the core idea of switching between characters is neat, the gameplay itself falls down, and given that games like this live or die on their gameplay, it isn’t a very good game. It is, however, free, and only takes an hour or so to complete. It isn’t really worth any money, but it didn’t really make me want to buy and play the game that it was advertising, BroForce, very much either.… Expand
