I had such a blast playing this - with all the stats, the inventories, rolling dye, I felt like I was playing a DnD game. Now obviously given the nature of the ‘game’ it’s hard to give an overall view of the story since there are some many options, endings and routes to get there and on top of that we (meaning I) don’t like to spoil much of the plot of books we review. As someone who plays Dungeons and Dragons weekly, I found the experience of being Deadpool’s newest assistant exhilarating. When reading CYOA or Fighting Fantasy back in the day, there was always a little extra thrill when you came across an illustration.

Miller explained that he loves Reynolds “as a comedian” but that he felt Reynolds had changed after the phenomenal success of the first film. Surely the gung-ho manner of his choices, and not the more staid options I went for, would have led to greater success – or at least meant something other than increased CHAOS? At the same time we're not always hemmed in on the one and the same path – Chapter 2, as it were, has three kinds and we can only use one per 'play'.I thought it only logical that to really succeed you'd still have to be very Deadpool-y, despite the (naff and dodgy) title. This short brought back the feeling people had when seeing Deadpool for the first time a year earlier. The story is interesting, the author has totally captured Deadpool’s irreverent attitude and there are so many options/ways to tackle the investigation that I found myself starting over again and again once my current play through ended. All the tropes that Deadpool fans know and love are alive and present, including the wise-cracking mouth, the stark disregard for personal wellbeing, and the uncanny talent for breaking out of storyville and directly addressing you, the audience.

Certainly you have more to try and keep track of, with a starting score for three attributes, a story that lets you gain more (especially CHAOS, there's lots of CHAOS if you follow the right paths), an inventory that can only reach five items before you have to scrub or use one, and places where dice impact on the story in different ways compared to how mercenary, persuasive or battle-hungry you may be at any one time. That said, looking back down the branches I took and filling out a map of proceedings, as I do for critiquing these books, I found the scale to be smaller than I had assumed – what looked like major turning points were just different ways to get to the same shoot-em-ups in a similar number of steps.

I’m really hoping this series continues and that it expands to include other superhero partners (or even other genres). TIM DEDOPULOS is the author of more than 200 titles, including both original and tie-in SFF and horror fiction, as well as role-playing games, books of puzzles, and a wide range of non-fiction works. In 2017, Miller was accused of previous sexual assault and violence by an anonymous woman who attended college with him; he denied the allegations. I had to mention how much I respected all the editors of the Fighting Fantasy books, and how much hard work it had to have been. Perhaps it's because I have only seen the junior examples of this genre over the last few years, but perhaps it's because a helluva lot of work has been put into this, but I found this really quite exemplary for its kind, and a very, very engaging gamebook.