“About as Much Fun as a Sandpaper Dildo”

Deadpool. A name known far and wide and not just for the 2 highly successful and hilarious movies, but because Deadpool is just about one of the funniest comic book characters ever written.

Constantly at war with the voices in his quickly deteriorating mind, this totally insane character is immortal… buuut he has cancer. The cancer eats away at his body just about as quick as it can regenerate, that kind of pain is bound to drive anyone to some seriously new levels of insanity.

When you’re immortal but constantly dying, it makes sense that one might turn to humour to help make sense of the world around them and laugh through the pain.

Deadpool has always been one of the more R-rated characters too, more welcoming to an adult audience – just like his good buddy Wolverine!

Yes, you can expect to find Wolverine in the game.

All of that is not lost in the Deadpool game, and Nolan North’s performance as Deadpool is incredible, he captures the character perfectly, maybe even better than Ryan Reynolds. But what would you expect from the biggest legend in video game voice-acting?

So why the negative subtitle? Well, the actual gameplay is arse.

To the game’s credit, it was released last gen, when XBox ruled the markets and every single game was a half-cocked samey shoot-em-up with about as much charm as a used tapeworm.

Oh look, a sewer level… Yay?

Don’t give them too much credit, though, we’re not talking 2010 here, the game came out in 2013. By which point the PS4 was months away from release and we’d seen some incredible games make their way onto our screens, there really wasn’t much excuse to make a game with mechanics this stale.

What’s really quite hilariously sad about the whole thing, though, is that even Deadpool himself will frequently quip about the crappy gameplay which is either the studio being self-deprecating or admitting that they set out to make a low-effort funless hack-and-slasher from the start, as though that was part of the joke. What ever happened to “Maximum Effort”?

Deadpool PS4 Review

The game starts off pretty strongly, with a miniature level inside Deadpool’s apartment which is loaded with Deadpool humour and really puts you in a great mood for the coming gameplay. Unfortunately, once you leave his apartment you’re thrown into the truth of what the game really is.

I don’t think that’s supposed to happen…

There are very few unique environments in the game. You get dark dingy office, dark dingy sewer, dark dingy prison, dark dingy caves, etc. etc.

There is a little smidge of creativity peppered into each of these places to give them some place within the Marvel universe, but not nearly enough to make it interesting.

Gameplay consists of fighting enemies in an area, travelling to the next area, maybe completing a puzzle of some sort, and then fighting enemies in an area again. Typically these fights will span multiple waves and you do get the occasional boss fight.

Not very exciting stuff, however, you are rewarded for your progress via cutscenes involving typical Deadpool shenanigans as he annoys Cable, Wolverine, Rogue, Psylocke and Domino who all just want him to understand the seriousness of the villain’s plot.

Cable’s never looked so good.

They don’t feature much in actual gameplay except for one fight alongside Cable and a mild Lady Deadpool reference. Which is a shame, it would have been cool to fight alongside Wolverine or maybe get a few sequences of Domino’s luck powers doing some cool stuff but, alas, they’re just there for the cutscenes.

The selection of villains is even worse. Don’t expect a big-time Deadpool villain like Taskmaster, no, no, you get “Sinister”. And, his fellow infamous villains “Vertigo”, “Blockbuster” and “Arclight”. Just who are they kidding with this? These villains are the kind of villains who only exist so that comic-book characters have someone to beat up in a bank vault while they spray exposition all over the pages.

Ahhh, the cutscenes really do have a lot of charm.

Except from maybe Sinister, these villains don’t pose much of a threat, and even Deadpool himself quips about how the game has total D-list enemies. It’s not charmingly hilarious like it is in the movie when Wade complains about the lack of X-Men movie rights, because it’s not a huge part of the movie, but the villains we’re given are all we have for the entire game, and it’s definitely disappointing.

The developers lean very heavily into the joke that if Deadpool made a game, it would just be boobs, explosions and poorly-written plot and in the end they don’t even pull the joke off right and you’re left with a disappointing waste of potential.

Oh, there are boobs, by the way.

Ignoring that, how does it play?

Like most hack and slash shoot-em-ups to be honest. It’s a bit like Devil May Cry, I guess, but with less creativity and action. You have 3 melee weapons to choose from; two Katana with decent attack and speed, two Sai (Sais?) which have high attack speed plus the attack strength of a napkin, and lastly two Hammers with very high attack but quite slow speed.

From what I can tell most people use the Hammers as soon as they can because of their high attack, but I stuck with the Katana for the majority of my run simply because they were my most upgraded weapon and had balanced speed.

There are also 4 ranged weapons, all dual-wield of course. The first weapons are simple handguns which don’t have great damage output but their accuracy is one of the best so you can easily get headshots, making them one of the best ranged weapon options. The Shotguns deal high damage from close up but are fairly useless at range, making them good for big melee enemies like the “tubbies”. The SMGs are a good “crap, I don’t have any better weapon ammo left” gun. With shoddy accuracy and small damage per bullet they’re really not going to be your go-to unless you hate aiming. The last guns are awesome, I love these “Pulse Rifles”. They have a decent, steady firing rate, great accuracy and massive damage. Once you have these you probably won’t use any other gun until the ammo runs out.

Deadpool’s arsenal also includes throwables, you have your standard Flash-bang grenade and explosive grenade but there are also Bear Traps and Land-mines which actually really come in handy for the harder sections of the game.

There’s upgrades, of course.

Apart from the throwables, you can upgrade all your weapons using “DP” ( Double Penetration Deadpool Points) which allow you to increase damage output, DP earnings, and ammo capacity as well as unlocking “Momentum” attacks. Similar upgrades are available for Deadpool himself, allowing you to increase Health, Momentum gain and more.

Momentum is exactly what you’re thinking it is (probably). You charge up a bar while you fight and then exhaust said bar by using a special move. Each gun has 1 special move and each weapon has 3. The best special move by far is the one you can perform using the Pulse Rifles. Deadpool spins on the spot firing randomly in all directions and, well, enemies die. A lot.

Here you can see the Momentum prompts on the left.

The enemy types are all pretty lame. They’re supposed to be sinister clones of famous mutants. The one very obvious one is a malfunctioning Gambit clone that runs at you repeating “Ma Cheri” (I think?) until they explode, there are also some quite tough to beat Havok clones who do a lot of damage using Havok’s signature chest-beam.

The others aren’t so clear though. There’s a really, really annoying enemy type which flies through the air and uses weather attacks on you, but it’s mostly electricity. I guess this is supposed to be storm?

Then, of course, there’s the “Tubbies” who are clearly clones of Blob. So, to be fair to them, the creativity is there but the execution is poor. Because the clones are infused with Sinister’s DNA, they all look the same and it’s boring. Typically the only thing that makes them stand out is what colour they are glowing or whether they are flying or not and in the end, all the developers tried to do is take enemy tropes from other hack-and-slash shoot-em-ups and then warp the X-Men universe to suit those tropes.

My Deadpool Platinum Experience

I felt no joy at getting this Platinum. Only relief.

On the PS3 version of the game, you can’t play the hardest difficulty until you beat the game on normal difficulty, but they got rid of that in the PS4 game and if you’re brave (or just stupid) enough you can jump straight in to the hardest difficulty and have a horrible time.

So I did, and I did have a horrible, horrible time. Almost every fight took 2 or 3 tries and there were multiple times where I’d boot up the game, play for about 20 minutes to get through one fight and then turn it off saying “Yeah, that’s more than enough for today”.

The hardest difficulty was originally put there so that players could replay the game and still have a bit of a challenge now that their character is almost fully upgraded from playing through on normal, but I thought I was being real slick by skipping over that part so I could get the normal difficulty and hard difficulty trophies at the same time.

I don’t like admitting that such a poorly-made game gave me such a hard time, or that I’m silly enough to just go with it and accept the beating the game was giving me. Had I not been a stubborn and impatient person I probably would have switched difficulties but sadly I am both stubborn and impatient.

The last level of the game, on hard, took me over 4 hours of trial and error because everytime I died (which took only one hit for some enemies) I’d lose 20-30 minutes of progress with some of the worst checkpoint placement in gaming. It is then followed by a truly ridiculous boss fight which is then also followed by a… Honestly quite upsettingly easy boss fight.

Despite the difficulties, I did make it all the way through the game and got both the difficulty trophies at the same time. After that, I just went to chapter select and replayed any levels which had trophies tied to them in some way and collected any I didn’t have. Pretty standard trophy-hunting procedure to be honest, but I have some tips below which might help anyone wanting to plat this game.

I would have at least liked a good trophy screenshot for this one… Oh well.

Deadpool PS4 Platinum Tips and Tricks

So, as I said, it’s good to know you can start on the hardest difficulty from the beginning, but, despite doing that I would actually recommend you don’t. It would actually be quicker for you to play through the game on normal first to get plenty of DP and skills and such before going for the hard run which will be a lot easier. Otherwise you end up wasting a lot of time in futile shoot-outs at a snail’s pace.

There’s not much to say other than that, the game’s trophies are pretty straight-forward, but I do have a few tips for certain trophies that might help you out.

The first thing I’ll say is DO NOT UPGRADE YOUR SAI (sais?). They’re not going to help you much, so leave upgrading them until you have every trophy except the one for upgrading your gear. There are 2 trophies which are infinitely easier with them not upgraded.

It’s a Trap Get a combo of 75 or more while fighting up the stairs at the front gates of evil

At face value this is one of the hardest trophies, but there’s a great method for it. If you leave your Sai (sais?… I’m gonna keep doing this) un-upgraded then as the fastest weapon it builds a high combo very fast, but the damage will be practically nothing without damage upgrades. So, you can hit an enemy quite a few times before they actually die.

I did this trophy by hitting one single guy 79 times with the Sai (Sais? … Maybe I should just google the correct pluralisation) before he died, so it’s actually really easy. Do the trophy on normal difficulty so they don’t die too easily.

Don’t forget you need to let the combo “bank”, so don’t get hit.

Be Like Joe Bank a 300-hit combo

This is actually really really easy. But, if you upgrade your Sai (I was right, I googled it, it’s not Sais) it’s the hardest trophy in the game.

Here’s how I did it:

Well, for one, I did upgrade my Sai, so sadly I had to get every other trophy and then reset my character progress from the options on the main menu, then play the game long enough to unlock the Sai again but eventually I had the right setup.

I then loaded up the level “Genosha”. There’s a method online where you just hit the first “Tubby” Blob Clone with the Sai and dodge his attacks, but I kept getting hit in the glitchiest of ways so I changed my method. There are a few enemies which spawn just before the Blob Clone and there are just enough of them that you’ll have a 300-hit combo by the time the tougher enemies come out as long as you only attack with your Sai and counter every attack that comes at you.

The tricky part then is that you don’t just need to reach a 300-hit combo, you need to bank it. I lost my first 300-hit combo because I got hit while running around the arena waiting for it to bank, so just be extra careful you don’t get hit or it will cancel out the combo.

And here I am, running for my life hoping they don’t hit me and cancel out my combo.

So You’ve Got Some Free Time? Complete “Landed in Prison” without countering any attacks.

I highly recommend that you do not press at all under any circumstances while trying for this trophy. You may be tempted to use it to teleport away for some breathing space but you’re just as likely to accidentally counter this way, so just keep well away from .

The annoying thing is that this chapter includes a boss fight in which countering is part of the solution to winning. You can instead just use flash-bang grenades against this boss to stun them, allowing you to beat the life out of ‘em.

This game doesn’t give very good trophy screenshots…

Beer Goggles Use all three switches, defeat the two phasers, and chase after Vertigo within 60 seconds

This one seems hard, but can be quite easy. The only thing that really slows this part down is the two phasers you have to kill. I highly recommend you place down as many mines as you can (as quickly as you can) in the center area while you run through it towards the first switch. This will likely deal with the phasers for you, saving you some time. But if you get to the center and there is a phaser still standing, just greet him with a couple of quick shotgun bursts.

The trophy won’t pop until you’re out the door. Which is annoying because this is also the checkpoint, so if you go through that door and you don’t get the trophy because you were too slow, you’ll need to start the chapter again from the start.

It might help to time yourself in some way, or just restart from checkpoint if you’re not confident in your speed. Maybe do a couple of practice runs.

Actually it doesn’t make for very good screenshots, in general.

The rest of the trophies are pretty simple, just do what the trophy says and you shouldn’t struggle.