The “Break it Down” Blog

Update #1: While we still stick to the assessment set forth in this article, please scroll to about 80% of the movie atleast and watch as the helicopter player picks up the tank player, and the tank player keeps shooting from the air as the helicopter flies the tank around… that is fucking brilliant.

After the initial set of movies out of GDC of Mercenaries 2 showing off the utter insanity that gameplay will be like, we made the assessment that while drop-in/drop-out co-op is exactly the right thing to do for a game like this, in the long run it isn’t going to offer that much replay-ability.

Out case for this was the game Crackdown, you remember, the one that got the exclusive Halo 3 demo key on it at launch right?

That game offered what sounded like (on paper) totally Epic co-op multiplayer, the idea of 2 super soldiers flying around the city, leaping over buildings and blowing things up with-insane-o physics. Imagine things like having your buddy hop in a car, and then you pick the car up and throw them (in the car) on top of the roof of a building so they can drive off it, EPIC, right?

For some reason, once you actually did that stuff for about 15mins, the novelty of it completely wore off. How many times are you going to throw a car into your buddy, or watch them completely decimate a compound of baddies with a maximum-upgraded “Explosion” modifier and a rocket launcher before that gets boring? Honestly, it’s about 3hrs worth of gameplay and then you never want to do it again.

I’m afraid this is exactly what is going to happen with Mercenaries 2: World in Flames. The game is almost too sandboxy, if there is even such a thing.

While the initial play-through with your friends is going to be a blast, everything moves so fast-paced and is so over-the-top, you really aren’t focusing on completing any task, you are just launching rockets into “every-fucking-thing-moving” and then collecting the reward and then your friend calls in a mass-nuke and you all die and laugh about it.

How long is that going to be fun? As long as the single player campaign lasts I suppose…

Games like this suffer from the 1 thing that is both it’s strength and it’s weakness: it’s fast-paced, completely-open world design. It’s the combination of these two things that make the game’s replay-ability so limited, let me explain.

If you take a game like Far Cry 2, it seems to have the same design (uber-open-world-with-no-rules) and you would be correct in that regard, but the difference is the pacing of the game. With a slower-paced, more focused game, replay-ability actually increases because each playthrough is completely different. Maybe you lagged too long on the bridge and forced the enemy to flank, but maybe the next time through you rocket-ed your way into the game and wiped them all out.

Far Cry 2 didn’t invent this, if anything Codemaster’s Operation Flashpoint did. Operation Flashpoint was another completely open-world shooter, the first of it’s kind when it came out, and brought with it a feel that had never been done in a game before, so real and gritty you weren’t really sure what you were playing… was it a sim? An classic FPS? Holy shit you can fly helicopters and drive jeeps? (this was years before Battlefield brought this to the main-stream with a more arcadey feel). The trick that made Op Flash so replayable was it’s pacing as well (similar to Far Cry 2), everything was much slower, more focused, you needed more planning and strategy. You couldn’t just walk into a came and lever it with a tank else you would miss the tank watching the town on the hill and it would take you down.

These are the things that the “Extreme” games like Crackdown and Mercenaries 2 are missing and will lead to a really fun first play-through and then you never want to play the game again, because there is no strategy involved.

This is our prediction, so if you tend to like to get a lot of life out of your games, Mercs 2 is going to be a “pass” for a buy, but a “must” for a rent.