Find out what I thought of Mercenaries 2: World in Flames for the Xbox 360. Is Mercs 2 worth your hard earned cash, or it it just a rent? And how good is the destruction? All that in my review. View Review

Game: Mercenaries 2: World in Flames
Platforms: Xbox 360, Playstation 3, PC, Playstation 2
Multiplayer: 2 Co-Op Online Only
Genre: Third-Person Shooter
Developed by: Pandemic Studios
Published by: Electronic Arts
ESRB Rating: T for Language, Use of Alcohol and Tobacco, Violence

Pros: Blowing Stuff up, Sound Effects, and Easy Achievements.

Cons: Driving, Dialog, Missions, Lots of Glitches, and when your not Blowing Stuff up.

Rambling:
My brudder (DernKuhn) asked me “What’s best about Mercs 2? Give me the pros and cons.” I said, “Pros: Boom, Boom and Boom (Stolen from the trailer) and Cons: pretty much everything else. Causing mayhem and watching the destruction that happens is a lot of fun, but driving vehicles to get to your next mission gets old and boring.

Gameplay:
Singleplayer
Once again, other then the destruction there’s just not much here. You do the same mission type over and over again. And like I said before, that gets old really fast.

[Update: Well I forgot to talk about the AI, this has to be some of the worst AI, plus the most annoying. You can sometimes walk right past them and they wont even see you, then other times they see you a mile away. (Really? Whats up with that?)

Also I forgot to talk about every time you run over a weapon your character cant just pick the ammo up automatically, you have to run back to the weapon and press the Y button.
(Well thats not hard to do you say? Well it is when your getting shot at!)]

Multiplayer
Same as the singleplayer. Making stuff go boom is double the fun, but missions get double the old.

Controls
Running around, flying helicopters and shooting stuff works well and is fun to do. Driving cars and boats doesn’t work as well. When you’re in a car with a gun on top, how am I supposed to click the A button, use both sticks, and shoot with R button? It just doesn’t work. (Unless of course you have more than five fingers. Then kudos to you mister!)

Graphics:
For graphics, they’re nice but it takes some of the textures a while to load, so while you’re waiting for it to load, it looks like it came right out of the PS1. Also there’s a bunch of late pop-in’s. Character models, Buildings and vehicles all look really nice…Wait. What?!?! I forgot explosions?!?! All I can say is well done Pandemic, well done.

Sound:
For sound effects like bombs going off, machine guns shooting, vehicle noises, and any other sound effect I can’t think of right now, all sounds amazing in 5.1. For voices, they sound good the first time you hear them, but you hear the same dialog throughout the whole game…
(“That’ll come in handy”, “That’ll come in handy”, “That’ll come in handy.”)

Note: I didn’t have music turned on, so I cant say anything about it.

In the end:
This game shows us that it’s always fun to blow stuff up, but it just has to many graphical glitches and other kinds of bugs to make it stand out. A very fun game for the first eight or so hours, after that nothing special…
(Did I mention there’s explosions in the game that look really nice?)

3/5 – Rent it