This brute’s called a “Panda Bear.” Why wouldn’t he be?

Everyone dies sometime — unless you’re NeverDead’s Bryce Boltzmann. Y’see, our hero’s date with destiny got postponed indefinitely after he lost the love of his life to a demonic scumbag. Five hundred years later, the once-valiant crusader now splits his time between hunting supernatural creeps and pickling his undying brain with booze.

Immortality keeps Bryce from his beloved, but it also makes him a formidable and flexible warrior. As you lead him against throngs of bizarre supernatural oddities, you’ll find lots of ways to kill them — even foes that shrug off bullets like a summer rain, and ones with enormous serrated knives for heads. Gun Mode lets you chip away at health bars with any dual-wielded combination of recovered weapons, ranging from pistol and shotgun to assault rifle and grenade launcher. Blade Mode is more satisfying than firearms, though: get in close, lock on with the left trigger, then charge and direct each strike using the right thumbstick. Slicety-slice!

Expect to play “pick up the pieces” every 10 seconds or so.

Enemies have cutesy names like “Puppy” and “Panda Bear,” but don’t be fooled — these beasts are plenty fierce. Perhaps more distressingly, your body holds together about as well as a beer-soaked piñata. Often the slightest love-tap sends Bryce’s limbs hurtling one way and his noggin another. Such ready dismemberment means you can heave your arms like grenades to distract and explode opponents, or toss your head into ventilation ducts. Unfortunately, the tendency of your meatsuit to go to pieces frequently hobbles the pace. Regularly rolling about to reunite head and torso soon becomes more aggravating than novel, especially when one hungry and omnipresent breed can hoover up your skull and end your adventure if you botch the dull sliding-targets mini-game that lets you escape from them.

The world around you is almost as fragile as you are, but this destructibility is one of NeverDead’s key strengths. Gas canisters and barrels fill rooms with explosive force, collapsing ceilings crush “Wombs” before they can cough up more monsters, and spinning collectibles lie hidden behind crumbling walls. Activating electrical panels and lighting hallways with fire is hardly the stuff of memorable puzzle-solving, but it’s always a blast to cook and paralyze the twitchy crowds of a crumbling museum set-piece or a filthy sewage plant.

Clearing a safe path for defenseless civilians is tough if you tackle Search and Rescue mode with less than three players.

As you shoot and carve your way through eight hours of campaign, you’ll earn piles of experience points to spend on a long list of simple selectable abilities. Amplify gun and blade damage, improve your disembodied head’s maneuverability, or add elemental effects to projectiles, for example. Few open up much in the way of fresh strategy, and you’ll unlock the most powerful options only after many hours of effort. Still, most come in handy during frantic clashes against outsize bosses. Several of these encounters work rather hard to wear out their welcome — the final battles in particular are needlessly prolonged and repetitive endurance exercises — but at least they feel suitably climactic.

Rolling credits needn’t mark the end of your explosive shenanigans, as you can hook up with a few friends online for four kinds of timed multiplayer. “Onslaught” unleashes unyielding waves that’ll torture any fewer than four players, but it takes only two to enjoy a race through the infested checkpoint courses of “Fragile Alliance.” Shepherding dopey civilians through “Search and Rescue” missions and gathering golden treasures in “Egg Hunt” matches could’ve been just as enjoyable if the maps weren’t such an unreadable maze of corridors — a simple mini-map would’ve made these modes much better.

Still, even if NeverDead isn’t quite the quirky prize it might have been, it’s certainly an idiosyncratic (and often one-legged) dance through entertainingly outlandish territory.

PUBLISHER: Konami Digital Entertainment  •  DEVELOPER: Rebellion Studios  •  ESRB: Mature  •  MULTIPLAYER: 2–4 on Xbox Live in four challenge modes (three co-op, one versus)  •  ACHIEVEMENTS:  Time-consuming  •  COST: $60

On Xbox 360

+ Lively mix of third-person gunplay and slice-and-dice sword-swinging.

+ Insanely destructible environments; modest customization; (mostly) fun boss battles.

– Infuriatingly delicate hero falls apart constantly; a single pitiful game-ending mini-game; uneven multiplayer.

? What spawned the turret with legs?

7.5