Dreamcast
Mindless third person shooters have tended to stick to a general formula; stick a camera next to or behind some kinda spaceship and shoot at big fields of stuff. Expendable is plowing different ground by returning to the other side of classic mindless shooters.
Games like "Contra" on the old NES were essentially third person shooters, but using guys with guns instead of an armed rocket. Once games like "Doom" and "Wolfenstein 3D" came along, that half of the older genre dwindled in favor of first person shooters.
"Expendable" is a nicely rendered take on this forgotten passageway of the gaming archives. The game resembles strategic programs like "Diablo," but excluding their planning portions. With a camera angle above and over a bit to view the three dimensional figures, you have a bird's eye view of the dark landscape, licked by flames...
You control tank decanted battle clones, dropped in the middle of a battle zone of aliens, robots, alien robots and their dogs. You start out with a weak gun, but the more enemies you kill, the more weapons you get from the remnants of boxes or your splattered opponents. You can also get medical kits and time extensions for the bomb implanted within you that will explode if the clock reaches zero. Your weapon must have explosive rounds, because enemies explode when you kill them, not to mention crates, fuel tanks and guns. Have you noticed that there's a lot of blowing up going on in the game?
Well, other than walking over a pink human hostage on occasion, there's not much to do except run around and turn stuff into shrapnel. Otherwise the game wouldn't be a shooter.
Relatedly, "Expendable" is not the most thought provoking disc on the market. You need to break a handful of green globes to open some doors, you need to walk around and kill things, and you need to get to the end of the level. It's fun, but it doesn't have a lot of depth. Of course, the same can be said for games from Space Invaders to any kind of racer, and there's no question that those have always entertained legions of players.
- Ted Watts
09-24-99
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