Mercenaries 2: World in Flames

Mercenaries 2: A World in Flames is a sequel to the much beloved Mercenaries: Path of Destruction, back when open world games were still being called "GTA clones". Path of Destruction was great for the sheer havoc that could be wrought and the various interesting factions to interact with. It has a whole slew of vehicles that explode, buildings that explode, people that explode, weapons to explode them with, and airstrikes to really explode them with.

Mercenaries 2, unfortunately, fails to top that. While it seems to at least understand what made its predecessor great, it falls short in many aspects and is so bug riddled and repetitive that one will find it hard to enjoy.

Mercenaries 2, first off, has a fairly laughable plot. Where the original's depiction of a war-torn Korea invoked scary thoughts and came too close to comfort to reality at times, Mercenaries 2 is noticeably more lighthearted. It is centered around the player helping a dictator take power, who later refuses to pay them and even tries to kill them. The player, enraged, spends the game accumulating money, weapons, and allies to take him down. While it fulfills its purpose, it just feels like a childish action movie as opposed to an evocative and downright scary depiction of a real life scenario (albeit the first game was a bit tongue and cheek as well).

While Mercs 2 sounds fun on paper, it fails to deliver. The games starts out promising, using powerful weapons and vehicles to wreak destruction of your foes, but the glaring problems soon become apparent. First of all, the AI is laughable. Hell, the AI is barely existent. AI may sometimes seek out cover but otherwise it just stands in place, shooting. Even worse, NPCs yell the same tired lines over and over again, and hearing the same heavily accented Venezuelan shout "he's behind that cover" or "I am going for the emplaced weapon" for the 500th time gets tiring. It gets even worse when the Allied Nations arrives later, with their stereotypical surfer dudes never shutting the hell up. It makes riding in vehicles with NPCs and taking them into combat zones, a cool mechanic in the original, unbearable. And your AI teammates tend to do even worse then the enemy, being slaughtered instantly in almost any combat situation and often just being worse than useless. They have little to no pathfinding and as a result walk right off of tall buildings and helipads, killing them from the fall.

Of course, this shouldn't be much of a problem, right? After all, the first games' AI was less than stellar and it still managed to be challenging. Well, suffice to say, not only is the AI in Mercs 2 worse, but the challenge is very cheap. Early on it isn't much of a problem (in fact, the game is laughably easy at first) but later as more and more RPG wielding enemies enter the fray, the sheer amount of explosives hurtling towards you will overwhelm and kill you. And to complete missions for the factions, you have to aid them in taking over outposts. This is where the allied AI comes into play, as telling squads to land on the helipad results in all of them walking off, singe-file, to their deaths.

Still, there is fun to be had initially. Tanks and other vehicles are satisfying to use and explosives can be fun. Leveling whole city blocks in amusing, but civilian casualties will cost you money so you need to be careful. This is also another area where the AI becomes the bane of your existence, as they typically run into the path of your vehicle causing you to lose massive amounts of money.

Missions mostly consist of going to VZ controlled areas, blowing stuff up, and killing dudes. There are some missions early on that show more variety, such as defending a businessman and chaperoning him around to various locations to destroy documents or destroying VZ buildings to draw out an enemy general, defending his counterattack, and then capturing him and carting him off. However, these missions get fewer and far between as the game continues, replaced by more and more simplistic "shooty explodey" missions. While the game seems to claim there are many different ways to meet your objective, it usually boils down to running in and shooting everything as land vehicles will get blown up to easily, anti-air will destroy any helicopter that comes in ear-shot, and airstrikes often run the risk of destroying your target, be it a person or an outpost. Couple this with the fact that airstrikes are borderline useless and many of them require you to be close enough to the target to throw the smoke signal, meaning you can either destroy it yourself, hijack it, or you will get blown to pieces.

This explodey fun quickly runs dry and starts feeling tedious. The main campaign doesn't offer any mobility as the various factions all have info you need, so it forces you to visit them all instead of choosing sides and actually making decisions. There are side missions for each faction but they will often piss off another faction, and since you need to visit them all to advance the story that can be bad news and will result in you having to bribe them.

Now to the worst part; the bugs. The game is absolutely riddled with bugs. I had a chance to play both the Xbox 360 and PC versions of this game and the PC version seemed buggier. Odd graphical glitches were abound, your support chopper often just plain old doesn't come or disappears. Things got stuck on terrain, audio screw ups ranging from things suddenly becoming soft to the dull, bass sound filter from when you're low on health not going away are frequent, to characters repeating lines.

Mercenaries 2 seems like a game abound in issues, and it really feels like an alpha some schmuck at EA decided to release early to get the Holiday sales. While some fun can be had in the simple explodey goodness, it runs dry quickly and all you're left with is a buggy, broken, and generally unappealing shooter.