Oh Mercenaries 2: World in Flames. I was excited for you. Pandemic Studios have made some great games, including your predecessor and the Star Wars: Battlefront games. The summer needed a free-roaming, destroy anything action-fest to keep me occupied until October and its onslaught of titles, and Mercs 2 seemed to be perfect for the job. But alas, Pandemic has let me down with what I would like to call: Glitch and Bore-fest ‘08.

FLAMING STORY
You’re a mercenary.

You were betrayed and shot in the ass.

You were not paid.

Time for vengea-ON NO THE GENERIC MONSTER IS ATTACKING, RUN AWAY!!!!!

At least the three mercenaries have colorful personalities, right? Oy.

FLAMING GAMEPLAY
When you start a new game, you choose which of the three mercenaries you want to spent hours playing as. Each merc has a special perk that they utilize: Mattias can regenerate his health faster, Chris can carry more ammo, and Jennifer can run faster. For my playthrough I chose Jennifer, since she has the only skill that’s semi-useful. Also, if I’m going to be staring at someone for hours on end, might as well be someone hot.

Let’s start out with the good. Mercs 2 takes place in a war-torn Venezuela, and it’s a pretty big place. If you’re going to have a sandbox-style game, the bigger the better I say, lest you end up with another Santa Destroy from No More Heroes. The controls are also very solid, from your typical third-person shooter control scheme to the driving, helicopter (which are miles better than GTAIV), and boat controls. There are also over 150 vehicles in the game that you can buy or hijack. From civilian pick-up trucks to tanks to battle choppers. Tanks and choppers (which require a grappling hook that is given to you during the game to hijack) even have cool button pressing mini-games that must be completed in order to take control of the war machines. The main missions that you have to go through to complete the game are also pretty varied and can be completed anyway you want. You can go in guns blazing or just call in a nuke on everything, the choice is yours. Finally, everything in Mercs 2 can be destroyed. EVERYTHING. From buildings to vehicles to big-ass oil rigs, everything has a life bar and once it’s depleted, sayonara sucker! I should also quickly mention the online co-op play. As long as you’re on the PSN, anyone can drop in or out of your game and help you out. You can also set it so that people can only join your game if they’re on your friends list or by invite only. The servers seem to be a bit on the iffy side for now (it wouldn’t let me join a bunch of peoples games for some reason), but the games I were able to join ran pretty smoothly. Get together with a friend and a lot of fun can be had just causing mayhem.

Well, that’s it for the good. Yep… one whole paragraph. Time to put some panties in a bunch! Let’s start off with your on-foot weaponry. The game does give you a decent amount of weapons to use, but really all you need to be successful is an assault rifle, a missile launcher, and C4. That’s it. I would say that sniper rifles would be useful as well, but someone at Pandemic didn’t seem to do any research on collision detection, and assumed that sniper rifle fire hits people on the third shot despite where the crosshairs are pointed. Also, there seems to be about a million different variations of assault rifle in the game, but besides some having larger ammo clips there really is no difference between any of them. Pistols are entirely useless, as they don’t do any significant damage and fire as slow as the crappy pistol in Coded Arms: Contagion. Sub-machine guns are also useless with the millions of assault rifles easily available. You would also think that grenades would be more useful, but when the mercs throw like little girls and the resulting explosion resembles a Fourth of July firecracker, they’re not. I mean come on, in a game like this give me a flamethrower or a mini-gun or something a little flashier. Finally, if anyone could tell me what use a SILENCED sub-machine gun or pistol will do me in a game that wants you to blow the crap out of everything, please do so.

Of course, what good do flashy weapons do you when your aiming them at what could possibly be the worst enemy AI I have ever encountered. Doesn’t matter what troops your fighting, VZ, guerrillas, Chinese, UN, whatever, they all have the symptoms: Stand around getting shot, don’t give chase after enemies, don’t notice the guy right next to you just got his ass shot off, and I can go on and on. I once took out an entire platoon by just sprinting up to each one of them and doing a melee attack, which takes out anyone in one hit. Why even use bullets…

Here’s a prime example of the crap AI this game exhibits: one of the later missions in the game has you chase after a target you’re supposed to capture or kill out of a mansion. Once you exit the mansion to chase the target, he makes a beeline to a vehicle he has waiting for him, and in-between you and him and his vehicle are four well-armed bodyguard waiting to stop you. I think to myself: OK, while I attempt to kill the bodyguards the target will get away in a car, which will then cause me to get a vehicle after I kill the bodyguards and a thrilling chase will take place leading me to god-knows-where.

…… ……

I ended up sprinting right past the bodyguards who did NOTHING, melee attacked the target to subdue him, killed the body guards and extracted the target. Mission and head-shaking complete. The only way these guys will ever kill you is if they have rocket launchers or a vehicle. Wonder why in the later missions of the game there are so many enemy tanks and helicopters and rocket launcher troops around? Well now you know.

There are 51 total missions in the game and only about 20 of them are the fairly entertaining story missions. The rest are made up of two kinds of side missions: checkpoint races and outpost liberations. First of all checkpoint racing…WHY ARE THESE HERE? Who though it was a good idea to put these in this game? The conversation must have went like this:

“Hey dudes, we got a game where the main objective is to shoot people and blow stuff up, know what an awesome side mission would be: racing through checkpoints with a time limit! Radd to the maxx, right!

“Uhhh, can’t we just have the player destroy entire towns full of VZ troops with nuclear air strikes?”

“No, shut up! You’re stupid and fired, in that order! No, everyone get to work on the Wookie-grooming mini-game we’re putting into the next Battlefront!”

It also doesn’t help that they are lame and no fun whatsoever. The next type of side-mission is taking over enemy outposts, and granted they are a little more fun. You basically do what the name implies: go to an enemy outpost, kill everyone inside, and call in allied troops to claim it. At first these are pretty fun since you can do them anyway you want, much like the story missions. But as you keep on doing them and doing them, you realize that killing the same old crap AI troops gets old really quick. Believe me, this comes from a guy who still enjoys the Dynasty Warriors games. Unfortunately, taking over outposts does give you some perks, like the faction you took it over for setting up shop to allow you to buy supplies, vehicles, and air strikes. More importantly, it gives you a helipad to land at so can travel around Venezuela instantly with the help of the pilot you hire early in the game. Believe me, getting around Venezuela in just a car takes forever. It’s also a good time to mention that despite missions giving you various checkpoints during them, if you die more often than not the game will put you back at the place where you accepted the mission and you have to travel all the way back to where the mission is taking place to continue it. Smart…

Finally, we come to the factions. There are five factions in the game(technically six, but the VZ is always hostile toward you) and staying friendly with them is important to complete the story missions and buy supplies. What is absolute balls though, is that even a single stray bullet can turn an entire faction against you, impeding your progress greatly. When you do accidentally shoot someone, a countdown clock appears on the screen counting down to when another soldier will call in your dastardly deed. Kill him in time and everything’s cool…except when another soldier across the map starts to call in, then the soldier that spawned out of thin air behind a rock, then etc, etc, etc. You can bribe factions who become hostile to you with millions of dollars to make them become friendly again, but come on, this is needlessly stupid.

FLAMING GRAPHICS
Mercs 2 can do things right here. The character models for the three mercs are pretty decent, explosions and fire effects are pretty cool, draw distances are acceptable, and the game maintains a steady framerate despite all the mayhem on the screen. On the other side, however, we’ve got crap textures on buildings, paper-looking trees and foliage, badly edited cut-scenes, slight screen-tearing, and the same death animation for every soldier. However, the biggest perpetrator here is the glitches…oh the glitches. I think it’s best that I do this in list form:

• Floating enemies
• Zoom function on weapons suddenly not working
• Helicopter pilot failing to pick up resources on the first try
• Air strikes not taking place when I call them and still costing me money
• Not being able to use C4 or grenades or some reason
• Two freezes at loading screens
• Enemies shooting through walls
• Enemies melting into walls
• Enemies being able to spot me from miles away
• A bunch of failed auto-saves
• Targets I’m supposed to kill in missions killing themselves
• Games loaded into your safe house will cause your character to look like he/she’s holding an invisible assault rifle.
• Soldiers holding pistols as if they were assault rifles

…and a partridge in a pear tree!

I didn’t know I paid 60 bucks to beta test a completed game.

FLAMING SOUND
Sound here is solid for the most part. The music fit’s the game nicely and the various sounds of explosions, gunfire, buildings crumbling, and the like all get the job done in DD5.1. The voice acting, however, is pretty bad. During the game, the soldiers and mercs all repeat the same lame lines over and over and over and over again that it becomes mind-numbing. I can only here “There’s the merc!” so many times until I level an entire country with nukes.

FLAMING MEDIOCRETY
Once you get friendly with a faction during the game, they’ll give you optional targets to destroy and targets to capture or kill to earn extra cash. These aren’t missions and can be done at anytime during the game by using your map PDA to find them. Only problem is, a lot of these targets belong to other factions that you need to stay friendly with. So instead of making these targets all VZ targets like the last game did with North Korean targets, you now have to wait till the end of the game in free mode to do these, lest you enjoy losing millions of dollars in bribes. It will probably take anyone 8-10 hours to complete the story missions.

Mercenaries 2 could have been a great game, and for the first few hours it was pretty fun. However, all its ugly problems reared their ugly heads and now it’s the newest member of the “disappointing sequel” club that includes Devil May Cry 2, Twisted Metal 3 and 4, Dynasty Warriors 4 and 6, Clock Tower 2, and various other disasters. A rental only if you’re a die-hard fan of blowing stuff up. If not, then just go back to GTAIV, there’s nothing to see here.

KEWL
+Solid controls
+Huge world to explore
+Freedom to complete missions
+Everything can be destroyed
+Steady framerate
+Co-op can be fun with a friend
+Sound is solid
+Replay value for the die-hard

LAME
-Terrible, Terrible enemy AI
-Bad story
-Lame side-missions
-Flashier on-foot weapons would have been nice
-Mostly underwhelming graphics
-Bugs and glitches galore
-Bad voice acting

Score

D