Mercenaries 2 Review

There are some incredibly cool moments

Mercs 2 is an action game with a focus on destruction, so thankfully the destruction in the game is impressive. Towards the beginning of the game when you're able to take down small buildings with remotely detonated C4 charges you'll get a smile on your face, but later on when you're blowing up massive buildings with air strikes, causing explosions so big that the sky fills with a bellowing plume of smoke and the light dims, that smile will run from ear to ear. Even the way large vehicles smash through huts and trees catch on fire impresses, but it's not enough to counter the problems seen elsewhere.

One of the fundamental problems is the AI of enemies. We've seen plenty of action games with dumb enemies, but those in Mercs 2 rank very near the bottom of the list. They show almost no signs of intelligence other than raising alarms or occasionally moving to a vacated gun emplacement. We regularly saw enemies stood motionless between buildings, firing RPGs at us from touching distance and driving into each other. In most circumstances enemies can simply be casually approached and killed with one melee attack.

Sadly the list of problems go on and on. You'll encounter huts full of RPG carrying goons, poking their heads out and blasting you in the face from point-blank range, with their bodies glitching through the surround of the windows. Unless you completely devastate the building they're in they'll simply re-spawn, which is infuriating if you're out of the required explosives. Travelling around the map is also a complete chore. Quite early on you gain access to helicopter lifts, but the pilot can only take you to designated landing sites. Why can't we be dropped off where we like?

Pandemic saw fit to include two-player online co-op play, which works but seems like a slight waste of time. It raises the fun factor slightly when you're able to run around and cause mayhem with a friend, but we can't help thinking that more polish elsewhere would have been more worthwhile. As it stands it's unlikely you'll find many willing comrades a few months down the line.

Hi-jacking vehicles soon becomes tedious

From a purely technical point of view Mercs 2 is a massively mixed bag. At times you can see where the next-gen muscle went, with the biggest explosions looking brilliant. The rest of the time, though, things look rather rough and occasionally quite ugly. Female character models are the biggest offender, falling into the man-ish trap that we thought we'd moved past a year or so ago. Graphical glitches are all over the place, the aforementioned draw distance is abysmal, and some of the effects look incredibly dated. The heat effect on the back of the tank is particularly bad, as is the water that looks like it has been ripped out of a game on the original Xbox. A decent musical score adds some much needed ambience, but the voice acting is poor and NPCs re-use phrases far too often.

It's actually hard to be so negative about a game we were so looking forward to. Somehow, despite the extended development time, Mercenaries 2 feels rushed, which simply isn't good enough when it's going to be directly compared to the ultra slick GTA IV and the high quality of the original game. Once you get past the terrible opening missions and start blowing things up with massive explosions there's a game here that is worth a look, but it's criminally unpolished and as such will leave many gamers rather unsatisfied.