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As the title suggests, the sequel to the popular last generation Mercenaries is a pyromaniac’s wet dream and by the end of the game you will have well and truly bombed the game world of Venezuela back to the proverbial Stone Age.
For those new to the franchise, Mercenaries 2 is an open world sandbox game much like the Grand Theft Auto series with a military setting and a touch of Battlefield’s vehicular combat thrown into the mix. It’s basically about being a one man army much like Stallone’s Rambo or Schwarzenegger’s Commando and it has a matching paper thin plot. In all of about ten minutes a South American dictator hires you for a job, then double crosses you and has his goons shoot you in the arse. Cue a pissed off mercenary hell bent on revenge. Hey, works for me!
The highlight of Mercs is explosions and destruction of such a massive scale not seen previously outside of RTS games. The opening tutorial concluded with me laser guiding a bomb onto the entrance of a heavily fortified gate then running towards the camera with my target in the background. Cue an explosion filling the entire screen that took me entirely by surprise and was so overwhelming you could practically feel the force of the shockwave and the heat of the blast. Cue a massive smile on my dial.
You start the game choosing one of three characters who each has a unique skill. There is Jenny, a female character who can move fast on foot; Chris, an African American who can carry more ammo and my favourite Mattias, a crazy mohawked Swede covered in tattoos and is voiced by the accomplished actor Peter Stormare (Fargo, 8MM, Prison Break). His delivery of Mattias’ lines is very humorous but due to the small number on hand they do get a little repetitive.
You start your missions with only your Australian assistant, Fiona on your team. You can talk to her at base to gain background information and complete challenges to hone your skills and unlock some items in the form of supply drops, new vehicles and different outfits. Fiona will also remain in constant, and I do mean constant radio contact during missions to keep you progressing. Through the course of the game you can recruit an Irish helicopter pilot to perform supply drops and ferry you around the island, a drunken Russian jet pilot who can perform airstrikes and a local female mechanic who can well, fix things.
The setup is classic GTA from the map, choice of missions, setting waypoints, taking vehicles and creating mayhem. There are different factions on the island that you have to work for to gain information so you may eventually exact your revenge. They pay you for jobs, which allow you to spend the proceeds on better vehicles, supply drops and airstrikes. Working for one faction may cause another to be hostile towards you and attack on sight but instead of this dynamic forcing you into tough decisions on which job to take you eventually have to work for them all. If you want to do some work for a hostile faction all you have to do is pay them off. It would have been nice to see some consequences of your decisions like GTA IV’s ‘who do you kill?’ moments. This is the first of a few design choices that were disappointing and held this title back.
Another is the game world, it is massive and getting around between some of the missions becomes extremely tedious and repetitive. There are some options for speeding this up but they are not always available nor do they take you to any point on the map. A lot of the vehicles apart from the tanks are designed around using in co-op play so in solo mode they lack much of an offensive option and make you a bomb on four wheels without someone riding shotgun. The design choice that is most frustrating is the interface and implementation of calling in airstrikes. Airstrikes are hands down the ‘crowd pleaser’ of this game and should be encouraged wholeheartedly but instead feel slightly neutered due to a lack of user friendliness. Apart from laser guided bombs all other strikes require you to be practically next to the target before you can call them in, as a result you are contracting a serious case of lead poisoning whilst opening up the menu via the D-pad and deploying smoke. Who wants to call in an airstrike on top of themselves? You’re a merc, not in the US Army.
Mercs 2 also allows you to play drop-in/drop-out 2 player co-op and it is a whole lot of city block levelling fun. It allows you to coordinate attacks, utilise a lot of the vehicles to their most devastating effectiveness and just create complete mayhem on an even grander scale. You can fight shoulder to shoulder or have one of you storm the front gate of a stronghold while the other C4’s the back wall. Your options are only limited by your imagination.
You always feel in Mercs 2 that single player and co-op are in a constant struggle for dominance. Where one seems to excel, the other suffers. As mentioned earlier, most vehicles are better suited to co-op. In co-op the second player can only assist the host with his/her campaign, the only thing that Player 2 can take back to his campaign is money earned. Also Player 2 is unable to make mission decisions. So they have to do a lot of waiting around whilst the host selects missions and challenges in the menus.
You can’t help but feel that Mercs 2 suffers due to the timing of its release, it was originally expected late last year and it is probably easier to be critical after seeing what was implemented so well in GTA IV. There is a lot of fun to be had, particularly in co-op and it is almost worth recommending just for the explosions and ensuing carnage. They are that good. Just don’t expect to be playing it for months on end unless you need all the achievements; it looks like earning a billion dollars could take a while. On a side note, sadly there is no Trophy support for PS3 owners.
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