Gaming Trend

Gaming Trend Review

Mercenaries 2: World in Flames

1. Official Site
2. Platform: 360
3. Publisher: Electronic Arts
4. Developer: Pandemic Studios
5. Release Date: 09/01/08
6. Genre: Action/Adventure

by Mitch Youngblood

“I do not deserve to be out of ammo!”

Were I to confess my personal shortcomings to the gaming world, I would start by acknowledging my tactical genius is somewhat eclipsed by Sun Tzu. When confronted by an obstacle, my first thought is to apply liberal doses of heavy ordinance to the surrounding area before proceeding. Whereas another gamer might opt instead for a more surgical approach, my eyes rarely tire of pixilated fireballs climbing ever skyward.

Mercenaries 2: World in Flames is aptly named because literally everything in front of you can be destroyed. The only non-destructible things would be the terrain, i.e. the mountain itself. You see all of those trees and buildings on the side of the mountain? They may as well all be wearing bulls-eyes. Pandemic deserves credit for injecting an overdose of anarchic fun into the sandbox genre. Whereas Rockstar’s sullen and boorish Grand Theft Auto IV was an homage to The Sopranos, Pandemic’s gem could more easily be compared to the energetic abandon of Iron Man were it crossed with virtually all of Robert Rodriguez’s repertoire.

The opinion of this reviewer appears to have grown increasingly jaded in this console generation. In the build up to releasing both the 360 and the PS3, the new era of graphics was touted as the crown king returning to his former glory. We would all kneel before Zod in supplication to the glory of graphical splendor the likes of which would turn Pixar green with envy. I have yet to see anything come close to approaching that, although Ninja Gaiden II came closest.

Long story short, the graphics in Mercenaries 2 get the job done well but never bowled me over.

The work on the graphics both in-game and in cinematics is solid, and it is fun catching minor details in the world, like the way smoke whips around as helicopters buzz by or the flaming detritus in the air. The heat bloom off the backs of armored vehicles is a cool addition too, but I have a personal fondness for the flame jets that crown the oil rigs. Enemies move in fairly static patterns, but they and the many vehicles have all been polished up to a high, merry shine.

If anything, the graphics have been refined and polished more than technologically advanced. Improvements are almost so subtle as to be imperceptible. Water is simply gorgeous. I’d go for longer swims just to take in the beauty were I not immediately overrun by enemy speed boats after shouting "Surf’s up!"

This sounds like I’m somewhat conflicted on the graphics and that is quite true. The quality is not in doubt, and the amount of detail on everything is staggering. But it’s more a gut feeling than anything else. I can’t be alone in thinking that everything could have looked better with another month or two of percolating. With those details out of the way, there remains an equally staggering amount of pop-in as the massive world loads around you, and graphical oddities continue to plague the series when you exit a building only to find your ride floating in mid-air (or when you float across the ground in a crouching position after descending a staircase). These should have been fixed by now, but here’s hoping they’ll be corrected by the third installment.

As a result of my conflicting opinion, I'm leaving the score where it stands. I was also unimpressed at the graphics from the original game and have since grown to like them quite a bit. If I've learned anything else about games I enjoy, it's that they tend to grow on me over time and this one bodes well for the future. So while I have not been completely knocked out, I continue to find new details buried across the world the more I play. As such, I am reservedly elevating the score a few notches to account for my eventual shifting towards a more positive light.

For those of us who love seeing every little detail recorded, the new menu options track every single aspect of the game. This is especially helpful since it also records conversations and tasks, which can be re-examined when the audio cuts out. Which it will. Repeatedly.

I mention this up front because the sound, in particular the voice work, is stellar. But at no point will I grant a perfect grade for a game with audio gaffes like this. When an audio cue simply overlaps another, that’s fine. It is to be expected in a world with so much going on. But when a character’s dialogue literally drops the last few words because the background music kicked in (regardless of its setting being so much lower than that of voices), it is not forgivable. It may not happen regularly, but it happens enough to be a real problem.

Otherwise, the sound effects are terrific. Explosions range from "wow" to "holy crap I can’t hear anything." This last is especially useful when significant others want you to stop what you’re doing and help with chores. "I’m sorry, I can’t hear you. Someone in the game just dropped a MOAB and all I hear is a slight ringing." Shouting this sentence will help complete the illusion.

The performers go for the gusto, especially Peter Stormare who returns as Matthias. I can never peg him as an actor. He’s either really awesome or really creepy or both (ex. Fargo, Constantine) but he is always fascinating. He has to have a good sense of humor too because he makes all of Matthias’ lines sing.

"Don’t take my car! Don’t take my car! Don’t take my... fine."

Cumbersome controls are the death knell for any game, especially one like Mercenaries 2 which has so many moving parts. Vehicles need to handle well but not all feel like boats. Characters should also be able to move fluidly. This game gets it mostly right, and succeeds where the Grand Theft Auto series spectacularly fails – aerial combat. The helicopters are easy to maneuver and very responsive, and buzzing along the ground won’t have you breaking out into a panic-induced sweat worrying that you’ll crash if you happen to take a breath at the wrong moment.

The main characters all handle well. Mui is a little more fluid than either Jacobs or Matthias, but not by a whole lot. The aiming feature takes getting used to though, especially when you’re being chased by several enemies some of whom are in trucks. You fire with the right trigger but crouch and zoom in/aim with the left trigger... then aim with the left thumbstick.

In fact, there are multiple times where it feels like you’re handling both while also hitting other buttons in odd combinations all while under intense gunfire and rocket attacks. For example, during a required race involving a monster truck and a not-so-abandoned quarry, you need to rotate the camera to see what’s ahead of you and then press down on the right trigger to re-center the camera while pulling the right trigger which jumps the truck over the numerous enemies who eventually appear and fire rockets at you all while you’re on a strict timer.

It’s not as difficult as it may sound, but it feels much more cumbersome than it should have been. Oh, and you cannot invert the X or Y axis controls, which is an automatic foul with me (although I freely admit that’s more of a personal thing).

"Assume the escort submission position."

I realized something as I was writing this review. One of the knocks I’ve heard about, and experienced myself, is how sometimes the game won’t spawn enough people or vehicles. The effect of which is that the game sometimes feels like just you, a bunch of guns, buildings, and trees. Upon focusing on this salient point, the revelation came to me that this was, at first glance, limited to the sparsely populated countryside where, let’s face it, no one would be anyway. But as I thought on it more, that theory didn’t jive with my experience.

To get to the bottom of it, I stole my contact’s pink car ("But it’s... pink!"), and drove through the countryside where I found cars and people on the road, but not a great deal of either. Next up was the city. Not a lot of people running around. So I called in an artillery barrage on one of the buildings to see if kicking over the anthill would produce some ants. I watched as the building collapsed, debris and smoke thickening the air, and far more people did in fact run around. There was even an element of dark poetry to the scene in a way.

Naturally I wanted that namby-pamby feeling to go away. I was a mercenary, damn it! So I shot an enemy driver, slapped some C4 on the hood, drove the truck as fast as I could towards a group of enemy soldiers, bailed out, and triggered the truck as it hit their front door. Next to where the explosion occurred, I spotted a giant stack of non-sequential bills on a wooden pallet. After tagging it with a tracer beacon, I popped green smoke next to it, and my chopper buddy picked it up thus making me $100,000 richer. I then grappled onto an enemy helicopter, showed the pilot the door after a quick mini-game, and flew off over the countryside looking for more trouble.

The great news is that Mercenaries 2 retains the “go anywhere, blow anything up” anarchistic mean streak from the first game while enhancing the scale of the world. The stakes aren’t anywhere near as high this time (a personal matter between a mercenary and a Banana Republic dictator doesn’t hold the same dramatic weight as capturing a North Korean dictator who is hours away from nuking the eastern hemisphere), so the overall tension is lessened. This has the distinct effect of reducing the need to rapidly burn through the game because of an imaginary 24-esque clock ticking down to Armageddon.

As a result, players can go crazy for as long as they want, free from conscience and guilt.

Returning characters include trusted Aussie field guide Fiona, battle hardened merc Chris Jacobs, equally battle hardened, though far more effeminate, merc Jen Mui, and everyone’s favorite angry Swede, Matthias. During the course of the game, several new faces show up ready for recruitment including chopper pilot Ewan (who’s either Irish or Scottish depending upon his vocal inflections), mechanic Eva, whose snarls belie a twinkle in her eye, and drunken Russian pilot Mischa. They each come with a set of challenges which you can complete for money and additional equipment. Everyone has their own needs and in order to get information on the various bad guys, you have to complete one mission after another for the various factions while trying hard to not get everyone so angry they opt instead to shoot you on sight.

The missions have a fairly wide variety to them that extends beyond the range of the typical Fed Ex quests so common (bordering on inherent at this point) to video games. Pandemic also goes out of their way to yank expectations out from under players with regular frequency, a technique that first gets under way with a bravura mission involving the retrieval of The Devastator™. To say more would spoil the fun, but it’s a canny set up for the rest of the game. Some times they do devolve into standard “hold the line” style missions, basic retrieval missions, and basic assassination missions, but there is enough creativity going on that it’s easy to run with. Especially with bunker busters on your side.

Side missions per faction appear on the map as little targets. Selecting one of these gives a brief run down of what the standing orders are, or at least what the general idea behind the target is. Either it’s a person that needs capturing/killing, or a building being brought down. You can plan accordingly, but those plans tend to go right out the window upon arriving in the target area. If Mercenaries 2 did nothing else right, it would still score in forcing players to think outside the box in terms of problem solving.

If a target is on a hill, then what is the best way to approach it? From the air? Not if those SAMs have anything to say about it. How about a targeted artillery barrage? Well, you need to get in close to lay the beacon at which point you may as well start shooting. Plus, the target is worth more alive than dead so that has to weigh on your plans. Is the game as weighty a mind bender as the recent Braid? No. But it is not a simple run-and-gun action vehicle either. Genuine consideration needs to go into each approach, more times than not while on the fly. You need to know what options are available at any given moment, what two weapons are strapped to your back, and whether either will help take down that target you just stumbled on, and so forth.

Above all else Mercenaries 2 remains fun to play. Fun practically oozes out of every corner of this game. It is fun destroying everything in sight, conquering one outpost after another, hunting down High Value Targets (both human and building), and most of all doing so along side your fellow merc. Call in an air strike on a part of any given city and just watch the buildings fall. It. Is. Joyous. Expensive, since you’re financially penalized per every civilian casualty, but joyous nonetheless. Besides, with all your friends offering challenges that include wagers, it’s remarkably easy to rack up the bank account numbers.

If only the core game were longer... By the time players unlock the second faction (out of several) the stat counter should show between 20 and 25% complete. Based on that, I figured the game would be over roughly 10 hours or so after I started. This is misleading. The amount of things to do should pack upwards of 12 hours for the core game, and north of 20 if you tack on all the outpost and HVT captures. The story missions actually do tend to the long side, but even at their most pedestrian they are extremely fun. Someone could spend a week or two just scouring the countryside looking for collectibles, in addition to tracking targets and causing general mayhem.

Much has been made of the ability to drop in and out of your friends’ games and rightly so. It is clean, quick, and efficient. You find a friend that’s playing online, hit join game, and you pop in right beside them. I was driving a battered pickup truck towards a target when a friend joined my game. He appeared in the passenger seat and held on as I drove through enemy gunfire. I’ll confess it might have been a shock to him when I bailed out of the truck (at high speed) in favor of acquiring an enemy tank (after another button mashing mini game). He hopped onto the machine gun and together we stormed and leveled our targets, to the financial benefit of us both.

It is a slick, slick way to integrate multiplayer into the game. But why then was two player co-op not implemented? If there’s one massive knock I have against this gaming generation, and it may entirely be leveled at Microsoft here, it’s the dearth of two player competitive gaming options available. Oh sure, I can play via Live with everyone. But what happens if a buddy is over and we want to tear up Venezuela on the spot? He has to go home and get onto Live to do so.

Frankly, that’s crap. Not everyone plays Rock Band guys, so if multiplayer is going to be in every game going forward then I want the option to play with someone else that’s sitting on my couch, not just with my buddies around the world. Whether Microsoft or the individual developers are to blame, some one needs to step up and add that aspect to their games pronto. Traveller’s Tales do both with their LEGO series and it works out just fine. I don’t want to have to send my child(ren) to the grandparents’ house just to play some co-op video gaming goodness with their Old Man.

Won’t you think of the children?

Hey Merc! That bike more’n you can handle?

There is plenty of long lasting value with Mercenaries 2. The three characters lack significantly different aspects (one heals quicker, one carries more ammo, one runs a little faster), but the alternative dialogue to situations is worth hearing. Right when you think a priceless comment can’t be topped, another character will mouth off something even funnier. References fly fast and furious to both the original game and others.

But the sheer fun that comes from creating a massive, completely destructible playground then arming participants with the latest in cutting edge firepower is impossible to overstate. Fun pours from this game and while it may feel like you’re fighting against the whole of Venezuela, it never feels like you’re also fighting the game itself. The flaws, though noticeable, pale when compared to the tremendous amount of sheer fury this game unleashes.

The one thing that would have made the original game perfect was multiplayer, and this one has that (albeit in a limited form). It may not have the longest, or deepest, storyline, but it has fun to spare and is energetic start to finish. Mercenaries 2 never lacks enthusiasm which makes a real difference when playing for hours on end.

Mercenaries 2, despite its flaws, is overflowing with win. It is fun, makes you think, provides plenty to do to make up for the rather short primary storyline, features an inspired vocal cast, and gives you the chance to unwind by carpet bombing Jamaican pirates with a friend. Mercenaries 2 is absolutely fun in spite of its quirks and should be at the top of everyone’s must buy list.

Gaming Trend Score

93

1. Graphics: 92
2. Audio: 87
3. Controls: 88
4. Gameplay: 98
5. Value/Replay: 97
6. OVERALL:93