Mercenaries 2: World in Flames

Mercenaries 2 is a game that went through a large development cycle;but mainly due the former Publisher(Lucas Arts)dropping it half way through development, then it being picked up by Electronics Arts.You guy's aren't reading this to hear the history of this game are you?Your reading to see if this game kick's as much ass as the first did.The simple answer is yea, it kicks ass, but it has more flaws and less appealing combat then the last.The game has so many flaws and bugs, like when you die your character just appears back on his feet when you click to respawn, and at some points where your character is falling down from a helicopter, your limbs just fly through other body parts and it just looks really flawed.Speaking of falling, what's up with the whole not dieing when you fall thousands of feet out of a helicopter?Obviously they weren't going for realism in this game because I'm sure if you fell out a helicopter...you'd die!Let's keep griping about falling out helicopters!Why is it when you fall out of helicopters and land in water, you get hurt?!?!I mean what other game does that!?!?Take not Pandemic, your not supposed to get hurt when you fall into water!Since I like getting all the bad stuff out of the way first I'm gonna keep talking negatively about this game.This is the bad stuff I took down in notes that I'll be talking about.Repetitive dioulouge,bad combat,sucky AI,mediocre story,annoying button prompt sequences,bullets scatter everywhere,and no offline co-op.Now I'm not gonna talk about all of that, because that would be way to much writing and I can't handle that much typing.So let's talk about the bad dioulouge.At first the dioulouge is great,it's funny and pretty helpful but after you play the game for 20 minutes you already know that you can go back to the PMC camp to find new missions and Fiona frequently reminding you of that is incredibly annoying.Well I might be wrong when I say the story is mediocre cause I surprisingly enjoyed it, although it is kinda weird how at one point your just trying to kill somebody that shot you in the ass to now trying to get a Nuke Bunker Buster from the Allied Nations or China, kinda odd but in the end I was satisfied.I'm tired of hating on this game so I'll only talk about one more thing and that is the bullets scattering everywhere.Well you can run these gambling missions with Fiona and they all involve you using weapons to destroy something but when you use your recoiless rifle to shoot cars your damn grenades sometimes miss your target and you lose time!This happens also when your in combat, and even if you shoot in short burst's it doesn't help and this makes it feel very awkward.Time for some of the good stuff like helicopters make traveling easy,gameplay is as fun as the first,driving controls are OK,and blowin' crap up is still fun.It doesn't hurt that also the game has great graphics with,surprisingly,no frame rate drops.I watched the IGN review and he said that traveling was hard because he doesn't know if the weapons are in that store and I agree but traveling is really easy when you just call for a transit and it only takes 20 fuel so fuel would be no problem and that brings me to my next point,fuel.It's great and what the story is mainly centered around but I think when you get full of fuel you should be able to get it and sell it to your friendly factions and gather a few extra bucks.
Gameplay:3 and a half stars


Multiplayer:Mercs 2 only has online 2 player co-op,which isn't to fancy and not really to fun to play with anybody that isn't your friend.And the leader of the two controls everything...everything!Which makes it impossible to play a nice game with somebody without a mic.Also why didn't they make it 3 player co-op, which means somebody could play as all characters at one time?Luckily, there isn't any lag during the games.
Multiplayer:2 Stars


Re-play value:This game has very little re-play value.You'll probably only make it through the story and not really want to do anything else with this game afterward.
Re-Play Value:2 and a half stars


End It!Wow, from this review it really looks like I hate this game and saying it has no re-play value means I don't want you to buy it but I actually do.I thin you should buy it and enjoy blowing shit up and not really focus on the glitches and annoying combat.Hope you enjoyed the review.
Final Score:3 Stars