Since the announcement of Mercenaries 2 I was really excited to see how it would shape up, then on the E3 previews I thought it would be one of the best games of 2008 because of the many possibilities and open world destruction, but now that it has been released and I have had the time (and patience) to play it I must say that I’m utterly disappointed…

 

Not only the game is full of bugs and glitches but the main story is weak, shallow and extremely repetitive. It’s obvious that Pandemic Studios aimed the game to be a sand box of mayhem (and for some people that may be an excuse to the terrible story line) and the best way to deliver that is with an accessible open world game (I repeat: ACCESSIBLE). Pandemic managed to recreate Venezuela to a point and they created a huge map to explore but you will be better not. The world is terrible to explore either on cars or helicopters but even worst if you go on foot; your cars will be blow up by random unseen enemies, your helicopter will just disappear with no apparent reason and if you decide to walk you will be shot on sight even by friendly soldiers. Also the fact that you cannot always instantly transport through the world is frustrating because of the aforementioned reasons.

The gunfights are unsatisfying and lousy, and you may as well just get close to the enemy and melee it because of the terribly stupid AI, but if you decide to shoot you will encounter weak weapons and cheap damage consistency, it’s easier to hijack a helicopter than to destroy it (unless you are flying the helicopter in which case the enemy missiles will never miss).

 

If you play the game just to blow stuff up, then you are about to be disappointed as well; you will be penalized every time you kill a civilian and if you hit any guy from a faction you may as well restart the game; when a faction gets angry at you won’t get any missions from them and eventually this will stop you from completing the main story. If you don’t care about this and just want to create mass destruction you are out of luck; the grenade launchers and all heavy damage weapons have way too limited ammo, so if you get your hands on one you will not be using it for too long. If you try to launch an air strike you will suffer because of how hard it is to just ask for it, you probably won’t be able to get close enough to the target or you won’t have time to line it up without being shot.

 

Because of the lousy AI you won’t die too often, because you can just run a few meters away and recover without the enemies even trying to follow you; but don’t get me wrong, you will die (a lot) but not because of being shot or blown up by the other guys; one of the many frustrating glitches of the game is that at any given moment the game will just kill you even if you still have some health left and there are no enemies close by…

 

If you can ignore the many bugs, the terrible story and the weak AI then you may find the missions somewhat interesting, the first few hours, the game is terribly repetitive and after a while it just keeps throwing at you a bunch of lookalike missions for you to do. And even if you can look over that too, you will find that the voice acting is awful, sometimes the FPS may go too low and all the main characters are the same (with just minimal differences) and the secondary ones are pretty much useless (mainly the mechanic).

 

Even over that Mercenaries 2 could be an enjoyable game for some people, even I had some short whiles of fun, but in the end Pandemic Studios just managed to deliver a disappointing unfinished game that its just not worth playing…

 

Ar.