Mercenaries 2: World in Flames (by Pandemic, published by EA) is a game that has been a rather long time coming. The original Mercs was a sleeper hit on the Playstation 2 and Xbox systems, combining a free-roaming, GTA-esque world with a military theme and the ability to call in airstrikes; in short, it rocked quite hard.
First announced back when Mercs was still a hot topic, World in Flames sort of dropped off the radar for a while, with nothing more than the occasional screenshot or trailer to let people know that the game was still in development. After more than three years wait, Mercenaries 2 has finally dropped into a marketplace that has seen quite a glut of open-world, ‘emergent’ games in recent times. So how does it fair now that there are next-gen consoles, spiffing graphics, and the vast shadow cast by GTAIV?
Short answer: Not well.
Things get off to a disarmingly good start in Mercs 2, with the tutorial mission serving as an introduction to the storyline, the exotic new location (dreary North Korea has been left behind for sunny Venezuela), and of course the game mechanics. A bunch of airstrikes and dead locals later, and the game gives you a cutscene or two and releases you into the main game with two simple goals: hunt down your crafty opponents, and get rich doing it.
The first thing that is immediately noticeable about World in Flames is the fact that the somewhat long development time hasn’t hurt environmental detail too much. Venturing into Venezuela is a visually impressive experience, with tropical vistas, swaying palm trees, towering cities, and gorgeous sunsets over pristine lakes greeting the player at every turn; it is amazingly easy to lose huge swathes of time just travelling around enjoying the different landscapes, which Pandemic have obviously spent a huge amount of time crafting.
Unfortunately the visuals are not quite so impressive when it comes to the rest of the game. Character models are clunky looking; factional soldiers and civilians are all cast from the same two or three bland and simple moulds; low-res textures show up surprisingly frequently, as does the dreaded ‘2D bush of death’; and clipping is a regular problem, with enemies often standing inside each other. Despite technically looking more up to date in terms of bells-and-whistles, World in Flames unfortunately seems to have more in common visually with its predecessor than a modern game; no one was expecting a BioShock or UT3 level of detail, but graphics and art-style that equal other games in the “giant open world” genre (there’s GTAIV again) would have been nice. Pop-in is also fairly noticeable, particularly when flying or travelling by boat.
The audio in World in Flames is, to be brutally honest about it, little short of terrible. Don’t get me wrong, the basic gunfire and car engine noises are fine, but the positives pale in significance when compared to the horror that is the voice acting. Barring Mattias Nilsson (who is awesome), just about every piece of dialogue by every character feels phony and forced; it may not be quite at the shoddy level of Smackdown versus Raw 2008, but wincing every time a player character, villain, supporting character, or even a random civilian in the street talks is just not on in this day and age.
Compounding this problem is the fact that the same dialogue will be repeated over and over and over again ad nauseam; prepare to listen to Fiona telling you that she “might be able to offer you a few suggestions!” in her husky Aussie accent every single time you leave your base of operations, accept a mission, or simply spend two more minutes playing the game after the last time she said it. Other dialogue is the same; witty comments made by the player character after killing an enemy are turned into fingernails down the blackboard when you’ve killed your thousandth enemy and are still hearing the exact same line. It is also worth noting that the subtitles during cutscenes rarely matches, or are synced up to, the spoken dialogue; even better, characters will often cut other characters off inappropriately before the sentence is finished in a way that feels more like a timing glitch, rather than some attempt at putting drama into the conversations.
After all that negativity, I can thankfully say that the game is actually fun to play…well, somewhat at least. This is essentially the original Mercenaries with almost no changes bar a lowering of difficulty and the addition of a grappling hook to facilitate hijacking helicopters in midair. Characters run around carrying two weapons plus assorted explosives, can steal vehicles ranging from motorbikes to boats (new addition, you can swim now too!) to tanks, and can order a variety of supplies and airstrikes through their PDA.
In an attempt to stop the ease with which you could just nuke the crap out of everything in the first game, the airstrikes have been toned back somewhat in Mercs 2. Due to running as an independent in this game, it is up to the player to find and hire both a chopper pilot and a jet pilot, and it is also up to you to keep them fuelled up by stealing handy tanks of black gold spread throughout oil-rich Venezuela. To make things even more challenging, the various airstrikes and supplies must first be bought from the various factions in person (or found littering the landscape), encouraging you to be prepared before going into battle.
This mechanic has a two-fold effect: firstly it does help to prevent the (oh so fun) airstrike spam of the first game, making you want to be more surgical with what you use so as to preserve your oil supply; this is a great idea overall, as it puts an emphasis on using pinpoint attacks that don’t use as much oil (such as the artillery or anti-tank strikes), rather than just using the same giant bomb over and over again.
The big problem with the execution of this new game mechanic is the fact that Pandemic have also seen fit to spread SAM sites, Anti-air missile troopers, and Jammers just about everywhere, meaning that an attack on a base will often require an infiltration of the enemy base to eliminate numerous enemies before you can even order in most strikes. When this is compounded by the fact that the vast majority of the airstrikes are called by throwing a close proximity smoke grenade, you soon realise that you’ve just broken into the enemy base and destroyed those SAMs just so you could drop smoke, spend money and oil, and run back the way you came.
Which brings us to our second of the effects that the new airstrike mechanic has; somewhere in the midst of breaking into the enemy base and wiping out half the soldiers trying to knock out the anti-air support, you realise that it’s probably just easier to kill the rest of the soldiers yourself, especially considering that there are health packs scattered everywhere and your hp regenerates at a prodigious rate anyway. The airstrikes, which are easily the coolest thing in the franchise (and look terrific to boot), are thus rendered fairly superfluous. In fact, I barely called upon them at all throughout the game unless it was demanded of me by the storyline; a Tank and some C4 were usually far more effective.
Other aspects of the game have also failed to live up their potential as well. A good job has been done not presenting any of the factions as obvious good guys in World in Flames; unlike the original, players are free to go up against the UN-like Allied Nations if they so choose, and all the factions have their own goals and rivalries that naturally cause problems for you as you try to juggle everyone’s happiness whilst also making as much cash as possible.
The problem here is that the factions are simply not as fleshed out as they were in the original game. Whereas the first Mercs gave you a few factions with obvious leaders, each with their own goals and personalities, World in Flames tend to bounce you from person to person within a faction with no exposition or explanation as to who they are or why they are fighting. The UP faction early in the game feels fairly fleshed out, with a nicely amoral feel to them, but the Guerrillas (for example) lack any character beyond “we are Marxists, fight the power!”
Individual ’story’ missions have also been significantly reduced, instead replaced by generic capture the outpost missions, races, VIP escort missions, and other filler that don’t even have a storyline explanation for occurring beyond a lust for power by each faction; even the awesome ‘Deck of 52′ core mechanic from the first game – in which you were required to hunt down enemies that corresponded to a playing card, and kill or capture them (with the goal of eventually going after the Aces) – has been watered down to basic missions for each faction involving capturing a certain number of High Value Targets (HVTs), most of whom are ridiculously easy to get hold of, for basic monetary rewards (as well as unlockables). Remembering some of the awesome missions and card captures, or even the briefings from Mercs 1 (complete with the ability to sneakily understand what was being said in other languages if you were the right character in the right situation)and then realising they are gone in favour of generic missions and bland dialogue is simply not a fair trade.
What few important missions there are tend to be on the easy side, but are still decent for all of that. Having the game always occur on the same (very large) map versus the original’s approach of splitting the game world in half and having certain missions happen ‘off-map’, has both good and bad points; the good being the sense of freedom offered by flying across the entire landscape in a helicopter, the bad being the ability to finish the last mission of the game in under five minutes in said helicopter – especially when three of those minutes were spent flying there.
I also feel that I have to mention the sheer amount of bugs that have made it into this game. Mercenaries 2 feels like it could have used another three months in Quality Assurance, as it is impossible to play for any length of time without coming across something that just makes you shake your head in wonder as this game being released to the public in its current state. Here are a few that I had the pleasure of coming across in the couple of weeks I’ve been playing: save games randomly disappearing; missions not registering as having been completed; airstrikes, supply drops, and ordered vehicles failing to materialise, but still costing oil and money; ordered vehicles arriving but then subsequently fading from existence; falling through the map on no less than four occasions; and captured HVTs shooting up into the air and floating twenty metres off the ground where they are (obviously) unable to be captured, but where they are also rendered completely impervious to harm, thus making the HVT mission impossible to complete.
None of these bugs and glitches are game breaking as such, but that doesn’t mean that World in Flames wasn’t released broken. The fact is that a commercial product should never be released in such a state, and certainly shouldn’t require a patch on the day of release; unfortunately, that was the case here. I imagine this is more of an EA thing (they publish Mercs 2) than a Pandemic issue, as a similar lack of completeness was seen with EA’s Army of Two, with much the same result.
Reading back over what I have written here, I just realised that it comes across like I pretty much hate this game; I don’t at all. In fact, I have had quite a bit of fun with Mercenaries 2: World in Flames by just experimenting with this huge, war-torn sandbox that Pandemic and EA have provided to us. There is little in gaming to compare with the feeling of dropping a nuclear missile on a fortified position and watching as the cloud of dust whipped up in the ensuing explosion blocks out the sun, or detonating explosives that completely destroy an oilrig as you jump off the edge and hijack an enemy helicopter in midair. The problem is that almost all of the really jaw-dropping, “This is AWESOME!” moments in Mercenaries 2 are completely overshadowed by the constant glitches, terrible AI, horrible voice acting, and thoughts of what could have been.
It is this last point, knowing that the there was so much potential here, that makes such an otherwise average action game feel so tragic; when the sequel to a much-loved game feels inferior in almost every way, it’s time for some serious questions to be asked, especially considering how much time has passed since Playground of Destruction was first released.
Maybe Pandemic will get it right in Mercenaries 3: Auckland Assault. Now that would be awesome.
Graphics: 7/10 (The world looks phenomenal; the inhabitants? not so much.)
Sound: 3/10 (Basic sounds are fine, voice acting and repetitiveness is tantamount to aural assault with intent to drive insane)
Gameplay: 5/10 (The great bits are so great that they serve to highlight just how average-to-poor the rest of the game is; jacking a copter in midair, whilst awesome, is little compensation for bugs, bland missions and story, and overall bad design.)
Longevity: 7/10 (Stupidly easy to finish, but the sheer variety on offer and the sandbox nature make it possible to just muck around in the world, killing things and starting wars; in fact, this is probably the strongest aspect of the game.)
Overall: 5.5/10 (This game should have been so much better than it turned out to be. Even if all the bugs were fixed tomorrow, the game itself is still startlingly average when compared to its predecessor, and is in many ways a step back. If my PS2 still worked I would play the original over this any day of the week, and that is about as damning a criticism as I can offer.
World in Flames can be fun in patches, and even somewhat satisfying, but it never quite rises to a level above mediocrity.)
-Tim Sweeney
Mercenaries 2: World in Flames Image Gallery (Courtesy of IGN)
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Tom Humes