Customer Reviews

Mercenaries 2: World in Flames

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(28)
3 star:		(16)
2 star:		(11)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

This game is a lot of fun. If you liked the first mercenaries, this one continues the party with lots more vehicles, weapons, and airstikes. The vehicle hi-jacking minigame is kinda silly, as none of them are so hard that you simply won't be able to do them, even for the best vehicles (most require mid-tempo button-mashing), and if you fail, you can easily try again with little to prevent it. Money is rather silly in this game, as you can earn 5 million in a very easy task in your HQ that takes about 2 minutes, and the best faction units and airstrikes in the game only cost like $250k-400k. The only time you really need cash is to bribe factions (upwards of $10million). Another odd point is the relative invincibility of your merc. You can fall from hundreds of feet or stand in the middle of an airstrike and survive (though my experience is with Nielsen, who is the "tough" one).

Pros:
-Lots of vehicles (170+)
-Game world is very large
-It is easier to control faction opinion than the first game. You can kill whomever you want, as long as you don't get reported (the games gives you 10 seconds to take out reporting units)
-Physics engine is very realistic
-Everything actually CAN be destroyed (though most respawn at some point)
-You can afford all the vehicles and airstikes you could ever want without having to "work" for money

Cons:
-BUGS. This game literally locks up my Xbox 75% of the time when I try to load a save. However, it appears this has been fixed through Xbox live.
-Missions are too redudant. Most missions actually have you repeat the exact same task 3 times, though increasing difficulty and increasing reward.
-Voice acting is annoying. Everyone says the same things over and over again. A pirate unit sharing your tank will continually say something like "hey mon" every 5 seconds. I'm not kidding.
-There are not enough core missions. I would estimate there are 12-15 between the 5 factions. The other "missions" are more like errons (drive from A to B)

The only real deal breaker for me in this game was the locking up while loading. As I said, an Xbox live update will fix this, but if you don't have live, make sure you are a patient person.

Mecennaries 2 is a far from perfect game but if you like GTA, Just Cause or other sandbox style games it should give you hours of fun. I never played Mercenaries 1, but I did play Just Cause and liked it even though it probably had more bugs than M2. There are many vehhicles that you can eventually use, many people to fight, races and other minigame type challenges.

however, I did get frustrated with the game somewhat because some things that you must do in order to equip yourself for proper gameplay are not completely spelled out. You need to keep your fuel supply up, by taking from enemy bases, to fuel your partners so they can supply you with weapons deliveries and airstrikes. this was not immediately clear to me, I had to stumble across that. I'm kind of a ADHD player so I don't always listen to cut scenes and AI team members drone on about possibly important game tips.

overall the graphics and gameplay are nice. I think its worth full price new. there is some funny dialog. and the game has good replayability I LIKE THAT ALOT!

MIKE

I got this in anticipation of an upcoming trip to Venezula and have since discovered that this misreprents the country. While I was able to hire a mechanic and helicopter pilot, my mechanic refused to build custom vehicles complete with rocket launchers and my pilot refused to pickup the fuel tanks I specified. Also I did not find stacks of money scattered around on hilltops or backyards and not only was I unable to use my grapple on a single helicopter flying by, it was surprisingly difficult to hijack civilians out of their cars or motorcycles! Unlike this video, they fought back and were extremely violent! In short, I would not recommend this travel DVD.

...try and charge me $60 for this game. Thank goodness for rentals, otherwise I would have been upset for buying this. To be fair, I didn't think this game would be that good ever since the first time I heard the commercial with that stupid song. But this isn't about a commercial, this is about the game.

Good:
-Co-op: It's pretty easy to drop in/out of a friends/enemies/complete strangers game. My one complaint is that when you first connect, it seems to take a little longer to load than some other games. However, once you're in, everything plays great.
-Environment: The game world seems pretty expansive from what I've played so far.
-Explosions: There are lots of pretty explosions to be had. Plus, I like how they've done calling in airstrikes and such, where you need to find the pick-ups in world and not just be limited by the amount of cash you have.

Bad:
-Explosions: While there are lots of things you can blow up, it seems like every single building I've destroyed has blown up the same way with the same animation. The sides blow out, and then the roof collapses, and then...destroyed building. There's no halfway destroyed buildings, where a wall is blown through but the roof is still up.
-Graphics: For as much as this game costs new, I'd expect some great graphics. Unfortunately, this is not the case. In the very first cutscene, my character (Chris, the black guy) looked like an ink blot for the first half of the scene. A giant, man-shaped ink blot. When I'm talking to someone, he just stands there in a way that no one would ever stand for long periods of time (where his arm has a 90 degree angle, like sticking someone up at gunpoint at close range). And then he doesn't move...just stands there. Plus, everybody is surrounded by a glow in the cutscenes...there own personal auras if you will.
-Bugs: I'll be honest here and say that I haven't played for a long time so far, so I don't have a giant list of bugs. But in the small time I have played, I've encountered a enough to know that this game should not have been shipped the way it was. At times, it seems like the pickups that you encounter in the world are being swallowed up by the ground. You'll see the icon, but the graphic for what's there will be under the ground. Another one I've seen (which I guess would be along the same lines) is when doing the winch challenges. My friend and I were playing around, and he flew the helicopter as high as possible. Once there, he dropped the package. Fun times...until I go to put the package on top of the shipping containers and the package is stuck under the map. I'd try and winch it, but it just acted like an anchor until I let go. Needless to say, I lost money on that challenge.
-Draw-in: Along with graphics, there is an INSANE amount of draw-in. During those winch challenges, I would be flying the helicopter and be a little over the top of the building and guess what? I couldn't see the shipping containers on the ground. Not until I descended and got closer would they appear. I know if I'm in a helicopter, a giant shipping container would be clear as day on the ground if I'm only 20 ft over top of it. Also, in the world of Mercs 2, you're characters are near sighted. Seeing anything more than maybe 15 feet in front of you is beyond you're control.

Added 9/14/08
-Saving/Loading: This game has an autosave function as well as a manual save function. Pretty standard in most games nowadays. Thing is, there's no load option...anywhere, except to continue from last save. If you somehow mess up and want to try again, you have to quit the game and do the continue option from the main menu. Hopefully you didn't autosave after you manually saved, or your manual save isn't worth anything anymore.

So, there it is. Would I buy this game? Sure, for $20, but not at a $60 price point. Meanwhile, if I want some Mercs action, I'll pop Mercenaries in and play that.

I had this game for a year and a half and I loved it. Yes it is not GTA: IV but it is still fun. I also had the first one for the orginal Xbox. The only issue I had with it is when I went to go stick in last week it wouldn't let me play it. All in all it is a great game and I strongly recommend going out and buying it.

This game might not have the best graphics, and there are a few bugs and glitches, but I have had nothing but fun with this game. It's straight forward and easy to play but still offers up a few challenges. I did have a few freeze ups when connected to xbox live, but I don't plan on playing on live anyway. It's pretty open ended and there isn't one "right way" to complete missions which allows for some freedom of play style. For under 20 dollars it was definitely worth.

This is a great game with a huge variety of fun vehicles, heart-racing air-dropped bombs/missiles, and interesting weapons. The single-player is a long trip and it's a fun one with a constant stream of new weapons and vehicles unlocks. The destructible environments can't be beat either. Don't want to go through the front gate to that base? That building in your way? Then knock it down with a few anti-tank rounds, let the dust clear and charge in!

Other than that, no version of this game can be played in co-op mode any more. EA, those disgusting, rights-hating, maggots disabled the EA online servers required to play the game with friends. The servers were only up for 17 months before they did this.

Even if you buy this game, be prepared to create an "EA Online" Account in order to play the game which is also a frustrating and annoying experience that is poorly implemented. That account creation part, though, they still have that up and running. They managed to figure that out.

Everything about this game is great, except that one day it may not play for you at ALL, even in single-player. If the EA account validation servers are taken down then you just flushed your money down the toilet. Pandemic, the developer did a great, great job of making a fun and unique game. It's just a shame that they sold their publishing rights to that disastrously de-humanzing and liberty-freedom-apple_pie-loving-customer-humiliating-money-grubbing-garbage-strewn-immoral-mess of a company called EA.

Any game that is so buggy that you cannot even get past the menu screen is NOT okay with me.

There's a very short list of games I've pre-ordered and a very short list of games I've straight up returned (only two on each). Mercenaries 2 appears on both of those lists.

I went out of my way to get Mercenaries 2 for the same reason 9 out of 10 people did... the freaking commercial! Right? Come on, pretend that song wasn't in your head for days. Pretend you didn't love it! Oh, and Mercenaries 1 was groundbreaking and inovative and brilliant. But mostly it was that SONG!!!

Mercenaries 1 kicked all sorts of ass: even and heavy tone, awesome vehicles and vehicle control, a wide open map, edgy story-line (you can literally kill North Korean soldiers with no reprecusions. Infact, it's encouraged; you get a bounty on their vehicles. Edgy stuff, man). All I wanted was more of the same. And what did you give me, Pandemic, huh? What did you give me?!

Nonsense, fluff story line (you're not murder for hire any-more, now it's revenge! Now it's PERSONAL!), broken gameplay (pop-in is so flawed it makes sniping absolutely useless: if you can see them, they can see you, and there's a LOT more of them than you) and the constant, inane, repetitive chatter by EVERY CHARACTER! What happened to the stark, drab, engaging and intimidating bombed out Korean DMZ? Now i'm in a damn Sandal's resort! But you know what did it? You know what finally made me grab my keys, my receipt and truck on down to GameTown to give it back and demand the money be transfered to a reserve of Fable 2 instead? I'm talking with the pirates in the game (modern pirates! Awesome! Edgy!) but, before I can work with them I have to... what? Eliminate their enemies? Steal oil or drugs? Car bomb some dignitaries? No, no, none of that, i just have to...

Beat them in a boat race.

A BOAT RACE!? Are you kidding me? Why? Why are we racing boats with each other? What's next, dance off? Rap battle? What? Why bother?

How about "help me and I'll pay you", "help me and I'll get rid of your enemies", "help me or I'll level your outpost with ordinance from SPACE!"? How about litterally ANYTHING else? In one quest I've gone from lawless warmonger to Sonic the freaking Hedgehog. It was like they were buying rejected GTA San Andreas quests from Rockstar to meet a deadline on a game they forgot they were making. Unreal, man, unreal.

But... it's not like there's no fun to be had here. There's some good ol'fashioned run'n'gun. And if the only think you liked about the 1st Mercenaries was blowing stuff up (and that is a COMPLETELY valid reason to like that game: who spent half-an-hour placing luxury cars on a bridge before carpet bombing the whole structure just because it was awesome? This guy, that's who...) then you may get a good time out of the sequel. Things explode pretty well, bad guys shoot at you with many different types of weapons. Did I mention ordinance from SPACE?!

That said, if you liked the 1st Mercenaries for any other reason, any other reason at all (tone, characters, gameplay, etc.) you're only going to be dissapointed here.

Oh no they didn't... except, yeah, they did.

Mercenaries 2 is an extremely fun. I had the first mercenaries game for the Xbox and I loved it. There were some features about this that were worse but it still remains a great game. The in-game PDA setup seems inconvenient but it is still easy to use and has a wide variety of vehicles, weapons, and airstrikes to choose from to choose from. There are even awesome cheats but you may want to do some of the easiest achievements first because it's really not that difficult and the cheats block many of the achievements. The online multiplayer is also cool if you find someone who knows how to play well and it seem like you can use cheats in multiplayer. I got it for $10 but it's still a bargain for around $20.