Airstrikes 2: Hooray For Airstrikes

By Shaunage October 13, 2008 1 Comments

Like every other person on the planet I completely missed the first Mercenaries game.

I'm not even sure I've ever seen a copy. The four people who DID play it liked it enough and spoke about it so vocally for the last few months that they somehow got everyone else excited for it. I've learned to completely ignore review scores from a certain site generally referred to around these parts as "the old job" and the 5.0 they awarded Mercs 2 was no exception. . Through some unmathematical lunacy I consider a 3 star review a significantly higher score than a 5/10 and I went with the score I did trust. Also, this was another of the "It's my birthday, I don't care, I'm not paying for it" games.

Mercs 2 seemed like a fairly short game for what it is, but the ingame clock on my completed file reads a little over 27 hours, just two hours short of how long GTA4's story took me and that game was LONG. Evening this out is the fact that me and a friend fell asleep with the game on and so added about 4 hours to the game's timer, but that still seems like a lot longer than I actually played it for. That said, Mercs 2 is the correct length. The missions are all reasonably similar, but the game doesn't go on for long enough for that to become an issue.

The voicework is aggressively repetitive. I was laughing at the ridiculous one liners at the start, but even in the first mission I heard everything the character can say about 3 times each. I played the rest of the game with the sound off while listening to the swathe of TGS podcasts from this and two other websites and I think it really improved my enjoyment of the game. I turned subtitles on and kind of half read, half skipped the cutscenes and mission intros. The story is much much less important that the explosions here. The minor annoyance with this is that an achievement will pop up directly on top of the subtitles during any important story sequence, causing me to miss the second line spoken in every single cutscene. To be fair, this because I was playing the game 'wrong' but it still seems a bit silly. Again, minor.

The closest comparison to Mercs 2 is Just Cause - a significantly worse, far glitchier game that I played for a much longer time. Just so you know, anyone with 1000 in Just Cause did 147 of those near identical takeover missions. The big thing that Just Cause did RIGHT was the stunt system. Mercs steals the helicopter hijacking from that game and it's a nice addition. I hope you like quicktime events (button matching cutscenes) because Mercs 2 has THOUSANDS of them, including a rather long one-miss-death one as the last boss fight. Probably the highlight of my play experience came as the result of an experiment to see exactly what I could survive. The game doesn't like killing you in one hit. I'm pretty sure you can survive ANYTHING and still have 2 health left. Near the end you get to order in a nuclear blast. I stood right under it and survived. It was spectacular.

In summary, pretty good game. Little bit glitchy. Things exploding. Worth playing.

Yes, I'm aware I didn't really say anything in this review. The title is stolen from Zero Punctuation but if you didn't recognise it, you have been missing out.

Next review will almost definitely be Silent Hill: Homecoming. Ban whatever you want, I will ALWAYS find a way to get it. Spoiler - that review is going to be positive.

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