Deadpool depicts the exploits and gleeful eviscerations of a giggling psychopath, gifted with guns, swords, and style. We've had plenty of that, thank you, but this one's novelty is a self-aware protagonist, starring in a game that's absurd, flippantly violent and incoherently narrated by its own admission. Here we have proof that it's possible for a game to throw itself on the mercy of the court, provided Mercy is the name of a totally sweet sword.

Deadpool is an impulsive egomaniac drawn from Marvel's weirder pages, and he's oh so happy to exist in a world designed expressly around him. Jolted to immortal life by a delirious performance from Nolan North, Deadpool is a pithy vector for the player - rather, the nightmarish caricature of a player as envisioned by a cynical game designer. His attention spans the pinch of two fingers, he makes extravagant demands with no care to their consequences, he slobbers over Unreal women and he'd rather die than listen to a syllable of exposition from the poor, plot-mandated X-Men. Their anguish must be akin to the people who worked on a cutscene you skipped in your monstrous impatience, unaware that it took four agonizing months of wrangling manatees in motion-capture suits.

There's no dearth of idiocy in Deadpool, but it's more palatable when paired with honesty - something that often feels amiss every time a new bad-ass action game struts out with the immaculately rendered Tear of Real Emotions This Time rolling off its cheek.