Customer Reviews

Mercenaries 2: World in Flames

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

 

 

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.

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.

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

...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.

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.

The game would have been awesome, too bad it does not work on new Xbox 360's. Bought one for myself and one for my friend, Cd loads then gets stuck in the intro screen when connecting to live. What fun is this game if youre not playing with buddies? Bought 2 originally from gamestop, did not load. Bought 2 from here, again, did not load, friends also did not load, 4 cds, 2 xboxs, none worked. Way to drop the ball EA and give up on a game after launch.

also tried all the fixes, flush the game cache, etc. NO DICE.

To summarize my feeling of the game, the ending non-cinematic of the game is a series of correctly timed button taps. Who on earth would wrap a game up with a combination of shoulder button, a, b, d-pad up? It makes no sense, whereas the prequel had an epic battle, this game ended with a feeling that the designers were bored of the game.
Going against the gritty look of the first game with everything being so damn shiny, Merc 2 took away what worked best in what seemed an honest attempt at making an inferior game. Gone were the sensible systems of purchases (You have to run around to different people to buy what you need, we do have phones and the internet, heck the people you buy from give you business cards that often have phone numbers, which when you need to go to a loading screen to buy things and get missions... it detracts). Who cares that most of your support strikes are called in by means that leaves you at ground zero, you will find most of them are useless as they have a penchant of blowing you up in the process.
Most annoyingly, the vast majority of the game can and should be beaten in a helicopter. No need for about 90% of the vehicles, they lack the mobility or firepower that the higher end attack choppers are loaded with. Which brings me to the grapple system and the vehicle boarding system, it is frustrating. I know they want to make it more of a challenge so you can't just hijack everything with ease, but honestly it is annoying as they didn't even vary the sequences to make things at least a challenge. Just memorize the pattern for each vehicle and close your eyes. Then the vehicles you have more than likely will disappear when you go to buy stuff or take a mission, you can't even put things into this garage that you supposedly have.
The game redeems itself in a decent storyline and fantastic graphics, but those alone can't make up for a broken game play system. So much of the game was rinse, wash, and forget where you put the detergent, then repeat. I'd rather play the first game, it was at least consistently fun. Do yourself a favor and rent the game, you will be saving yourself money and the shelf space for a better game.

Mattias Nilsson is back-- and Venezula is going to pay the price!

The original "Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction" was a real surprise for me. I had initially passed on the game but a friend recommended it so highly that I found myself picking it up about a year after release. The "open nature" of the world and the variability of how to accomplish each mission hooked me almost immediately and I found myself playing the game time and time again.

The point is that if you are a game player that loves an "open sandbox" world with all of the room for creativity and inspiration that entails, you're going to love Mercenaries 2: World in Flames.

I'll admit-- it's not a perfect port of the original concept. The "Deck of 52" is gone-- in favor of a more non-linear "high value target" set-up. There are still four factions-- and making their acquaintance isn't as easy as it was in the last game. However, the free-roaming nature and the ability to call down air strikes, supply and vehicle drops, and evacs when needed is part of what made the the first game so much fun. I've logged about 20 or so hours on Mercs 2 thus far and I'm still enjoying myself-- sometimes just driving around the virtual Venezula exploring the environement rather than simply rushing from job to job.

Graphically, it's a step up from the original but hardly something that I'd refer to as "next gen". Still, the graphics are sharp, the music is fun, and the voice casting is pretty spot-on. (The banter of the NPC's sometimes gets a bit repetitive but I find myself just tuning them out more and more.) The number of usuable vehicles is dramatically increased in this game-- including the addition of various watercraft including a few that were far larger than I would have thought for player-piloted craft. Also, boarding vehicles has now been "enhanced" by small mini-games rather than the direct approach but I have to yet to find this too much of a nuisance.

My only real complaint with the interface comes in the somewhat clunky nature of how queued support items are called up. Literally a player must stop, call the queue, and then choose the item rather than queuing it up and then using it when needed. This has caused problems a few times when a pesky bunker needed tending to. However, aside from this I find that I'm enjoying Mercs 2 far more than I have any other game purchase in recent memory!

I'd give it a solid 4 out of 5!

Overall Rating: C

I am a huge fan of sandbox games. I love the ability to free roam and have control over what I want to do next.

That being said I was a bit hesitant about buying this game after reading some professional reviews and some here on Amazon.com. However, I decided to pick up a copy of the game when it dropped to about $30. Even though the game was about half the price of when it was first released I still felt disappointed. The graphics were decent enough, but as far as sandbox games go this game just did not do it for me. Here are some of my reasons:

- Missions felt repetitive. In some other games you are asked to accomplish missions in a variety of manners. It seems that this game was intended for only one direction, blow things up. This is fun at first, but the novelty quickly wears off.
- The story line is week. After playing games like Fable 2 and GTA IV, this game seems like a big let down. The plot line does not take you on any twists or turns. Someone wronged you, so your mission is to blow as many things up as possible until you can seek revenge, which involves more blowing things up.
- There are glitches in the game even after the downloadable updates. Other reviewers here have mentioned this issue and it's something you shouldn't expect to see in a finished product.
- The game is short. I was able to finish the game in under 10 hours. That's not very long for a game of this genre. True that there is some replay value here where you can play with some other characters, but the outcome is not vastly different. The "Lost and Damned" downloadable content for GTA IV provides longer game time for an add-on.

Overall, I would suggest playing this game if you are a fan of the sandbox genre. However, don't spend your money on buying the game, rent this one and save yourself some money.

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.