Review: Mercenaries 2: World in Flames

This is what you get when you take a good idea and then don't really bother

{ Sun 12th October 2008 }

It would be fair to say that Mercenaries 2: World In Flames and I didn't get off to the best of starts. Bought on the promise of sandbox fun, big explosions and, most importantly, an entirely co-operative campaign, I was rather keen to get hands on with the game only to run face-first into the brick wall of disappointment in the guise of region-locked online play. This to me was a deal breaker and if I had known this fact up front I would not have bought the game.

However, I had bought the game and so I felt I should at least give it a try, and see if I could find someone the game deemed I was allowed to play online with. And initial impressions from the introductory training mission were certainly positive. Controls are simple enough to get right into, whether driving a vehicle or running around on foot, and it was entertaining to shoot the crap out of people and blow things up in a spectacular fashion with tanks, RPGs or satellite-based air-strikes.

The intro mission also sets up the incredibly loose plot for the game, which boils down to the guy who hired you in the intro trying to kill you and then taking over power of Venezuela, and you want revenge. There's a bunch of factions all vying for control of chunks of the country and it's many of these that hire you as you begin to build reputation and fortunate in an effort to get close to Ramon Solano, the guy who tried to kill you.

Let's rock this house

And the game proper starts just as bombastically as the intro suggests with you claiming Solano's now vacant mansion as your base of operations (after taking out a bunch of guards in a particularly explosive manner, that involves an indoors tank). With a base you then have to start building your team, which means following the story missions that are always obviously marked.

In fact for an open-world game Mercenaries 2 is fairly determined to keep you following the main path through the game, to the point that it can get quite annoying in its incessant pestering. If you spend more then a minute or two wandering off to do your own thing, as you'd expect to do in a sandbox game, then the game will remind you that you can head back to the PMC (your base) "If you're stuck for things to do". You will hear this message so many times it will start to drive you mad, especially since you're very rarely ever stuck for what to do next, so clearly sign-posted the story missions are.

There's a lot of hand-holding taking place, including the traditional irritant of sandbox games: the artificial limitation of where you can go. In Mercenaries 2 it takes the form of 'satellite coverage' that your base can use, but it's just a bogus way to limit how much of the map you're allowed to venture into. In fact, making it further through the game and with a large chunk of the map only becoming available when a couple of new factions enter the fray it becomes somewhat apparent the limitation is stopping you seeing those areas before the factions are relevant to the story — or in other words so the developer didn't have to deal with the complexity of pre- and post-occupation in the areas.

Missions at a faction of the cost

As mentioned above, the factions in the game provide you with the majority of your missions and money making opportunities in the game; after all, a merc needs to buy many things that go 'boom'. There will be a few personal missions to undertake, which form a chunk of the main story campaign and in the first part of the game quickly lead to you adding a helicopter pilot, mechanic and jet pilot to your merry band of misfits (which add pick-up/drop-off capabilities, custom vehicles and expanded air-strike capabilities respectively to your available options).

The main missions, which require you to go to the appropriate base on the map and chat to someone to select them, aren't the only source of income though. There are also a bunch of faction-based targets on the map that you can take on at any point, taking the form of either a person (a High Value Target) or a building that a particular faction would like dealt with. Buildings just need to be destroyed, by whatever means, but High Value Targets actual earn you more if captured alive.

However, the factions haven't learnt to play nice yet, so at every stage you need to consider your relationship with each faction as actions for against each will alter how friendly or hostile they are towards you. If a faction is friendly they will happily provide you with work, but piss them off and the faction members will shoot you on sight. The only exception is the Venezuelan Army (known as the VZ), under the command of Solano, who you can attack without consequence.

To get around the issue of factions out for your blood you can disguise yourself in an appropriately marked vehicle, though any action such as shooting or hooting the horn blows your cover immediately. So whilst this is a neat concept it falls apart horribly because apparently some grunt on the ground can identify that it's that mercenary shooting at him from a helicopter some distance away, even though it's the helicopter of an enemy faction. I wish I had the remarkable eye-sight these fuckers possess.

Straw houses

Though maybe the fantastic vision is the programmer god's way of compensating for distinct lack of intelligence the AI possesses. The AI seems to contain the modes: stand, shoot and raise the alarm. All of them governed by a seeming death wish.

And AI issue are just the tip of iceberg that is the mountain of bugs this game is riddled with. You can't go more than a few minutes without running headlong into one of the many issues, bugs or glitches that this game plays host to, ranging from little irritants to some really big problems. I've had vehicles I'm in randomly explode for no particular reason, fallen through the ground and got randomly trapped in scenery (both situations require a game reset), had the woman's sound samples play despite playing as one of the guys, had enemies that were unaffected by bullets, had my helicopter guy refuse a pick up at my home base because the area was "too dangerous", some achievements randomly refuse to pop, oh and had the game lock up my 360 when I tried to load one of the menus. And that is just a small sample of the various problems I encountered whilst playing Mercenaries 2.

But beyond straight up bugs this game also has fundamental issues at a gameplay level. The missions themselves are uninspired nonsense, there's far too few of them, and in an effort to pad out what's available a number of missions are exact repeats, just with tighter time limits. Then there's those air-strikes the game likes to make so much of. There's no denying how much fun levelling areas can be with the air-strikes, but for some retarded reason the vast majority of them have to be called in with smoke grenades or beacons, which require you to be about an inch away from the desired target, and this includes some of the most powerful strikes in the game. So say you want to level part of an enemy base before you wade in to mop up those left standing; great idea, but no joy Charlie, since you'd have to walk right into the middle of the base to call in the air-strike.

On top of problems like that there's random design decisions like the fact you take no damage from being inside a vehicle that explodes (handy, but why?). Despite there being a bunch of different rifles and guns in the game I was unable to discern what the difference between them was supposed to be (besides how many bullets they held and the noise they made). And then there's the GPS, oh the GPS. You can set way-points on the game map and the game will plot the route there, except you are better off ignoring it 100% of the time as it's crap. Most of the time it will eventually get you to the destination, but never via the best route (in fact you're almost guaranteed some pointless detour), and every now and again the game would just give up and remove the way-point for you, which was nice.

And sadly the co-operative online play does little to help you to ignore these issues, even introducing some additional problems of its own (such as corrupting the save game of one chap I played with). It has it's inspired moments, and can potentially be more fun than the single player, but for the amount of hassle it's not always worth it. Also it's still region-locked for no good reason (yes I know there's a patch on the way, but too fucking late, damage done Pandemic).

Let's end this

There are moments in this game that are genuinely enjoyable, moments that are amusing and times that you will have fun with this game. The problem is that they can be few and far between, and often, just as you drop your guard, one of the many bugs in the game will show up to punch you in the balls, lest you forget how many issues plague it. And because of issues, gameplay quirks and oddities this game ends up being a frustrating experience and one I have the overriding memory of as 'terrible'.

Part of me wants to call Mercenaries 2 a rough diamond, but more accurately it's a rough diamond that has been smashed to pieces, haphazardly glued back together and then buried in a massive mound of crap; somewhere underneath it all was the makings of a good, maybe great, game, but it's all ended up a horrid mess.

I could not, in any sort of good conscience, recommend this game to anyone. You could very well find it entertaining, but it's too short and too badly put together, and such shoddy workmanship doesn't deserve to be rewarded with your hard-earned cash. If you've got a hankering for a good sandbox game that doesn't take itself seriously, encourages a little mayhem and provides a great co-op experience, then I'd suggest you go pick up a copy of Crackdown.