Mercenaries 2: World in Flames

Giyanks22 Mercenaries 2: World in Flames Review
Gamertag: Giyanks22

Mercenaries 2: World in Flames is a game that has a totally open world environment, but unfortunately doesn't deliver on every level.

The story is unoriginal and boring. You are going after a Salano, a Venezuelan, who has a lust for power, and tries to take over the country. The game  strays away from the story, because it takes you forever to move the plot along. You have three mercenaries to play as, but the story is the same for each one, which really doesn't make any sense. You are enemies with the Venezuelan army, but you can choose to befriend, or attack other factions such as Pirates or Petroleum companies. This is causes a lot of problems, because you might accidentally shoot a Pirate, and then they call you in as a hostile. If they call you in, then the faction becomes hostile towards you, and you aren't able to deal with them anymore, unless you bribe them.

The voice acting is atrocious. They repeat lines over and over again. The lead voice for Mattias is horrible, and you can't understand a word he is saying. The female lead is done by Jen Hale, who some of you might know as Bastila orCommander Shepard, does an okay job with the role,  but is no where near up to par with her previous work. The third mercenaries voice acting isn't anything special either, but is much better than Mattias. The charecters have different abilities, but it doesn't really effect your game play.

The Visuals are horrible...there is no other word to describe them . The textures are ugly, and each charecter has light around them . I know that Pandemic wasn't planning on making a visually appealing game, but come on...There have been rumors that the PS3 version of the game has anti-aisling issues, but I don't have PS3, so I wouldn't know. There are times when soldiers get stuck in windows, and you can't kill them, because they are stuck. This gets into another problem. The animations are completely recycled. They are the same animations. If you steal a tank the animation is the same exact thing. The explosions are all the same.

The AI (artificial intelligence) is absolutely horrible. Pong has better AI. I would walk up to a hostile unit, and it would take the unit eight seconds to start attacking me. This makes the game pretty easy in some ways. If you are low on health, then just run away from your enemies, and hide till your health recharges. The poor AI can also make the game harder, because it becomes inconsistent. You are twenty yards away from an enemy, but they fire right at you, but when you are twenty millimeters from an enemy they don't even attack you.

The weapons are another issue. When you fire the weapons they just don't feel right. I find that you have to really hit your enemies from really close, to maximize your fire power.

The whole system of making money from whoever is willing to pay is fun, but in many ways it comes up short. If you hit a civilian with your car then you lose 5k...what if a civilian hits your car with their body, because that is what happens more often than not. The Civilians will jump in the way of your  car as you are driving, which leads to you losing at least $5,000. This happened to me no less than 10 times.

The driving camera is horrible, because it never stays on where the car is pointing, which makes it very hard to drive, and on some of the races or driving challenges it causes you to go  off road, and makes you lose the time challenge.

The only thing that could possibly make this mess of technical issues better is playing with a friend...right??? Well Co-Op has its own technical issues also. If I join my friends game. I can import my charecter data from my profile, which just means I keep my money and gasoline. I don't get any of my air strikes or vehicle drops, so now I have to go blow 100 grand on all this stuff I should have. I co-oped with a friend into a game where we both had the same charecter. I was going to change characters, so that we could differentiate between the two. If I switched charecters I would lose all my money and gas.

Mercenaries 2: World in Flames could have really been an excellent game, that would keep people coming back and wanting more. Unfortunately a truck load of technical problems keep it from even being mediocre. I would highly recommend not buying this game, and instead just not playing it, or if you really badly want it then rent it.