Mercenaries was THE blow shit up game for the original Xbox and Mercenaries 2 doesn’t mess with that formula at all. If you played the first game, you’ll find a whole lot familiar when you fire up Mercenaries 2 on your Xbox 360.
The Story
The story is very basic. To-Be President of Venezuela hires you for a job, screws you over and takes the Presidency. He uses the VZ Army to secure all the oil refinery cities as he sells his oil to the highest bidding nations. Meanwhile, no one screws over either of the three Mercenaries you can choose to play in the game and your mission is one of total revenge.
Sights and Sounds
Much like all open world sandbox games, the graphics aren’t going to make you drool. The graphics in Mercenaries 2 are good though for this genre of game. There are some really great lighting effects when things blow up. If you’re standing next to a gas container when it explodes, and are looking in that direction, the screen will go black for a few seconds and gradually fade in as if your eyes were exposed to a bright flash.
There are some nice smog effects as you fly around in choppers, however the "pop-ins" get irritating. This is the effect where the "line of sight" is fairly short while you're cruising around and objects "pop in" at the last moment. This is typically done to keep video card GPU's from overloading but they're frustrating to deal with in most situations. The pop-in effect is far worse in Mercenaries 2 than it was in GTA IV, this may have to do with the speed of some vehicles.
We’ve had many examples of driving up to a road block and forced to quickly swerve left where things look clear but, as you arrive closer, you find a cement caber blocking that way and... smash. Although it may be fair to block the path, it's also fair to give you more warning and allowing you to react to the situation. This optimization technique may keep the game running faster and the GPU happy, but it makes for frustrating game play situations and limits the realism you may feel while immersed in the title.
Nothing is more infuriating than driving down the road and, out of the blue, a big rig spawns 20-feet in front of you requiring you to swerve left ending your trip with a flaming vehicle impailed by a steel pole. This is mostly an issue in higher speed cars or motorcycles as opposed to choppers or boats, but it is an issue that takes a bit away from the game play and shows off the limits of the game engine and/or hardware.
The sounds in the game are nicely done, the rumble of the pink car outside your base to the machine gun noses to the various explosions. They’re all very satisfying.
GamePlay
Much like the first game, the story in Mercenaries 2 has you joining forces with factions and helping them out in their wars with other factions. At the games core are missions which will advance the story forward but along the way you are given a healthy diet of sides to do as well. With each new faction you join, you will get a list of buildings to destroy and a list of High Value Targets (HVTs) to capture.
There are also numerous mini-games which win you cash and rewards and get more difficult as you progress. The mini games the factions give you will unlock additional items you can purchase from them in their shops. These mini games help break up some of the "go there and kill/blow up the target" rinse and repeat of the game. So far we’ve done various types of racing, target shooting and chopper winch challenges. The mini-games you get in your headquarters building allow you to wager on your success which is unique.
You equip support options for your current mission through the use of your PDA. There are three slots you can fill with support options and the three you pick will show up in our support option menu when you press up on the D-Pad. Support option items can be purchased from faction shops once you’ve unlocked them or you can find various munitions for pick-up once you have a hired chopper pilot on your staff.
The support options are highly destructive and fun to unleash onto the bad guys. You may find yourself giggling the first time you drop an air strike on a building you need to take down. You will not only take down the target building but you’ll take down the adjacent buildings with it along with bad guys in the area and blow up any gas tanks near the attack. Your support options aren’t limited to various bombing and mortar strikes; you also get a healthy selection of transportation and military vehicle drops, weapon and ammo drops and transit pickups.
As you gain or use various munitions in your activities, you will see your inventory levels reflected in your headquarters building. You will start to see skids full of money stacking up and munitions piled high to the ceilings as you progress in the game.
The game itself can be a good challenge if you play it alone. The game doesn’t scale down for a single player and up for co-op, it’s pretty much built for co-op. So, if you go it alone, you will be in for some challenges but it’s certainly not impossible to do missions on your own. The one down side is if you play alone and die, you have to re-start the mission where as with a co-op partner, they can run over to you within 45-seconds and revive you. All three Mercs have this mutant heal thy self ability, even though bad guys you kill will randomly drop health kits, your Mercs will heal themselves if you can find a quiet corner and not take any bullets for a few seconds.
There are plenty of vehicles available in the game. When choosing a boat, you can select everything from a rowboat with outboard motor to large gunships with multiple turrets and levels; you can also fetch the ultra fun jet ski. There is plenty of action on the water. If you can fill a large gunship with friendly faction members and a co-op partner, you can own the water ways in no time. For land vehicles, there is plenty of variety to choose from, scooters, motorcycles, junkers, vans, big rigs, pickup tucks and sports cars. Then there are the military class land vehicles with light and heavy tanks, armored personnel carriers, jeeps and trucks. For air travel there is a selection of choppers to hijack out of the sky. Some of them are just transport class while others have guns and rockets aboard. You can’t hijack choppers until you have a grappling hook which your mechanic will give you once you get her to join your team.
Hijacking vehicles that enemy factions occupy brings up a button pressing mini-game and an interactive cut scene. Each different vehicle will have a different button sequence. For example, all heavy UP tanks will have the same button sequence while a heavy VZ tank will have a different button sequences, the same goes for transport choppers. If you just want to hijack a pedestrian vehicle, you need to run up to it and press Y to toss the driver out and get in.
The disguise system makes its way back into Mercenaries 2. If you stay in a vehicle long enough without someone being able to see you, you will be disguised as whatever faction that vehicle belongs to. So, if you jump into a pedestrian vehicle, you’ll be disguised as a pedestrian. If you’re disguised as UP faction and the UP is hostile to you, you’ll be able to drive around in their controlled areas without taking gunfire. However, the disguise only lasts so long if you’re being watched and you will see a meter shrink as your disguise is wearing off. At any time you take hostile action against a faction while disguised as them, the disguise instantly goes away and you will be engaged in gun fighing from all sides.
Weapons in the game are plentiful as you can probably imagine. You can carry one bullet weapon and one rocket/grenade weapon at a time. Switching between them is a simple right bumper tap. You can get guns and ammo from supply drops but almost every bad guy you kill will drop a gun and ammo. So, unless you want a specific weapon like a sniper supply drop or an RPG supply drop, there is plenty of weaponry around the battlefield to use for free.
Accuracy seems to be non-existent in this game unless you are using explosives or a sniper rifle. You can either hip shoot or zoom in and do an actual sighted shot, but none of it is very accurate, it’s more like half a clip, one kill. Besides guns and rockets you will also carry around C4 and grenades which, again, you can find all over the place in faction camps. The explosive damage of C4 and grenades is pretty strong, it doesn’t matter if they’re being thrown/launched at you or you’re the one doing the throwing/launching, the blast radius is huge. We’ve taken 20 or 30 points of damage after an RPG hit a good distance to the side of our Merc. Running away to what we would have though was a safe distance when in the area of an explosive doesn't seem to always solve the situation as "safe distance" is much further than we'd have expected. In general this isn’t too big of an issue, except there are endless spawn barracks in many of the bases which have two RPG soldiers hanging out the windows shooting two at a time. If you kill one, another one spawns and takes his place. The only way to get rid of these hazards is to C4 the building to the ground.
There are also plenty of mounted weapons, such as mounted machine guns on the ground or in vehicles, grenade launchers and AA guns which work equally as well against ground targets.
Co-Op
Any time you turn the game on to play by yourself, you are actually hosting. There are three settings you can pick from for allowing people to join your game. 'Friends Only' means anyone in your friends list can jump into your game at any time. 'Everyone' is a setting which allows anyone looking to co-op up on Xbox Live to jump into your game while 'Invite Only' is basically private and nobody can pop into your game without you inviting them first.
In co-op mode, if you’re the host, the world is at whatever point in the game you have progressed. When someone joins your game, they will be playing in your world and the things they do affect only your world. If they go and make enemies with a faction you’re friendly with, it only affects you. When the guest hops out, their own world remains how it was before they jumped into your game. Your guests won't receive missions or story progress when playing in someone’s game. The only thing you take away with you as a guest is money you've earned. If you collected air strikes or gas tanks, that is converted to money and imported into your world when you leave.
One unexpected thing we encountered playing as a guest was an achievement unlock for making a faction friendly. In our world this faction was hostile and it remained hostile when we returned, but the achievement still unlocked. This shows how separate the two environments are when playing co-op.
You'll find yourself tethered to your partner by about 400-feet when playing co-op mode. The radar has a red circle showing the maximum distance you can get from your partner. When you go beyond this 400-foot barrier, both your screens will get snowy like you’re watching TV on an antenna and the signal is weak. The farther you get apart, the harder it is to see anything. This helps keep you both doing the same missions and playing together rather than co-op soloing like you could to in Crackdown.
Unfortunately, a couple of dumb design choices were made in co-op mode. First, when the game host is talking to contacts for missions, the guest can’t see or hear what’s going on. Your screen displays your merc character standing there in front of the contact doing nothing while the host goes through the options and narratives. You can, however, shop if there’s a shopping option with the contact the host is talking with. Secondly, only the host can take part in challenges. You can go along on the challenge, but on mostly, you’re along for the ride and can’t really help out. It would be nice if you got your own car to race or a more important role. For challenges, you should leave those to do on your own when a guest isn’t in your game since they’re not really co-op enabled features.
Glitches
There are a lot of glitches in this game, so many that you have to wonder what the mindset was at Pandemic. Perhaps they wanted to release the title before the holiday blockbuster list arrives? None of the glitches we’ve experienced have been show stoppers; they’re funny if anything. For example, once while flying a chopper, the vehicle just disappeared and we fell out of the sky. This fall knocks you down to one health but you regenerate your health at a good pace as long as you didn’t drop into a hostile faction camp surely leading to death. Once, when getting into a car, it was as if the Mercenary turned into Hulk and he flung the car over his head by the door and it went flying into a near by hill and exploded. Nice effect, sure, but not quite what we were going for when we pressed Y to get into the car. There are reports of glitchy achievements as well, though we have yet to experience any of those ourselves.
