Open-ended worlds aren’t anything new to today’s video game landscape. Grand Theft Auto and Crackdown have both showed how great this genre of action games can be, so it’s disappointing to see Mercenaries 2: World in Flames fail to reach the high expectations that were lauded before release. Let’s examine what went wrong.
Right off the bat, players will encounter the horrible voice-acting that plagues the entire experience. Not only does it encourage you to play the game on mute, but it kills the possibility of enjoying the campaign – or whatever you call the terribly boring single-player storyline. From the onset, the storyline lacks any exciting motivation to continue forward and explore the plot.
Another detriment to Mercenaries 2 is lack of intelligence for its enemies. Players can often run behind a building and sit there for five minutes to heal without ever having to face the opposition sitting around the corner. It’s unacceptable for the enemy AI to be as thoughtless as they are in Mercenaries 2. It’s disappointing that the firefights within the game are unflattering as they currently stand. On top of that, the civilians often throw themselves into the middle of the battle to find death – something that players will be penalized for.
If you’re a fan of destruction and killing innocents then look elsewhere as Pandemic Studios will take away money you’ve earned in the game. In the future, for the appeal to casual gamers who just want to aimlessly run around and destroy stuff, it’s recommended Pandemic removes the penalties.
What else drags Mercenaries 2 down to the level of being a total disappointment? How about the repetitive and unsatisfying missions? Or the total time it takes to travel from one place to another? Or maybe the fact that enemies will appear out of nowhere and sometimes will continuously spawn without stop.
Even the graphics portion, which does have a few decent highlights, isn’t up to par. At first, you may find yourself drawn into the Venezuelan world that Mercenaries 2 recreates, but after an hour or so, you’ll realize how dissatisfying it is. The graphics are a back and forth battle varies between attractive environments to poor character variations. Lastly, the cut-scenes are laughable, though not in a humorous way – they are as if Pandemic hired high school students who shot YouTube videos to direct the cut-scenes.
The only redeeming value of Mercenaries 2 is the online co-op play, but even that has bugs and glitches. With that aside, one can only imagine if Mercenaries 2: World in Flames had six more months of development to fix the kinks and add a diverse set of content to make the game engaging.
