Mercenaries 2: World in Flames Hands-on Preview

The opposite of subtle, according to the laws of the English language, is ‘obvious’. Mercenaries 2 is the opposite of subtle too, but describing it as obvious would be something of an understatement. It grabs obvious and soaks it in petrol, before blowing it up and burning any protected areas of rain forest nearby, just to be sure.

Mercenaries 2, like its predecessor, is a free roaming sandbox title and will therefore face plenty of lazy comparisons to Grand Theft Auto. But while GTA has become entrenched in the details of the climb up the underworld hierarchy, the next release from Pandemic and EA is far more concerned with the over-the-top action that defined Just Cause.

Cast as a hired gun who will take assignments from anyone with enough cash, you are unleashed upon Venezuela, a world dominated by a semi-fictional oil crisis. The plot is fairly detailed, but essentially it just provides a backdrop for unleashing chaos on the picture book island landscape.

Mercenaries 2 is a game that throws sensitivity to the wind and laughs in the face of morality. Sucked into the game world, merely passing through a quaint village on the way to a checkpoint is a good enough reason to level the place with a bazooka, and the sheer beauty of a sunset behind a heavily wooded hillside begs that it be engulfed in napalm.

In fact, in the current climate of caution that dominates the industry as it tries to prove its maturity (a situation compounded by the Manhunt 2 fiasco), even the most actively left-wing of gamers surely can’t help but warm to Mercenaries 2’s carefree disregard for anything but the sheer pleasure of blowing things up you shouldn’t.

The gameplay works in a very similar way to other successful sandbox games, combining third-person combat with arcade vehicle controls, but the entire mechanical structure is pitched towards a level of destruction previously unseen in the genre. Compared to its contemporaries, there are far more military vehicles in the array of transport waiting to be stolen, and most are heavily armed. The weapon set also has a weighty emphasis on the likes of bazookas, though the game’s box will likely draw attention to the numerous air strikes at your disposal, which can be called in at most points to coat your surroundings in balls of flame.

Apparently every object on the game’s landscape can be blown-up, stolen or bought, and hands-on time with the Xbox 360 version gave the impression that this is absolutely true. From a humble crate to a towering skyscraper, everything can be reduced to dust, which is where the graphical problems begin. The preview build was still in a very early stage, so to criticise the constant glitches and hefty texture pop-in would be unfair, as Mercenaries 2 has all the signs of something that should be detailed and sumptuous.

However, the balls of fire and tumbling rubble as buildings and bridges were pounded with helicopter missiles left a great deal to be desired, which is particularly disappointing in this next-gen age. Instead of any sense that each structure hit by a ballistic was broken up into a shower of concrete lumps, each impact just seemed to trigger a pre-scripted animation of the building’s demise that had nothing to do with the specifics of where and how you struck it. In the worst cases, whole tower blocks simply slid into the floor behind the vale of a dust cloud.

The driving physics were also questionable, with all the vehicles feeling very similar and possessing a floating quality that evoked painful memories of the first 3D football games, where it felt like the players where running on a inch deep cushion of air.

The final complaint at this stage concerns the control layout. Discrepancies between the on-foot and vehicle controls mean the change over as you leap in or out of a vehicle can be confusing and filled with fumbles.

Still, there is much work to be done on Mercenaries 2, and in its present state it is still looking ambitious, and feels great fun to play when not dogged by the curious sensation of driving. While its ‘in your face’ attitude will put off some players, most will adore its hilarious approach to gaming ethics and its gun-ho attitude. In the end, we all love blowing stuff up.