The “Break it Down” Blog

Summary [7 out of 10]

Mercenaries 2: World in Flames is a third-person shooter. As the name suggests you play as a mercenary. At the start of the game one of your employers double-crosses you. The remainder of the game is spent working your way up the food chain until to can get your revenge. The game has a wide open world set in Venezuela. The game lets you roam the world freely looking for ways to make money. The money you make is then spent on guns, vehicles, and air strikes.

Introduction

If you played the first Mercenaries game you have a pretty good idea of what types of things to expect…a lot of missions to destroy specific buildings and verify a high value targets. In the first Mercenaries the missions got really repetitive because you were doing pretty much the same missions four separate times for each of the factions. In Mercenaries 2 there are a still a lot of similar missions for the various factions, but they feel much less repetitive because you are open to complete them however you want and in any order you want.

The Good

• The open world is fantastic.  You can go anywhere you want as soon as the game starts. You may get killed withing a few seconds because you have insufficient firepower, but the option is still there. Even with the open world the game does a good job pointing you to locations that will lead to new missions or equipment.
• The economics of the game work well. You can play as few or as many of the side missions as you want, but each one you complete pays you more money.  The more money you have and the more missions you finish the bigger the armaments you can buy.  By the end of the game you can have huge stockpiles of cruise missiles, carpet bombing runs, attack helicopters, tanks, and rocket launchers.
• The missions are open like the world. You’ll be given a specific task, like destroy a building, but it is up to you how you want to do it. You can sneak in close and plant C4, use a laser guided smart bomb from a distant hilltop, hijack a tank and shoot it to pieces, or crash a helicopter into it. Even though most of the missions in the game are either to blow up a building, catch/kill a high value target, or to clear out an enemy base of all the occupants; I never got tired of doing them because I could choose how I wanted to approach each one.  Although, to be honest, one I purchased some carpet bombs I had a tendency to use them frequently just to see the resulting explosions.
• The achievements. While a good chunk of them are for completing specific missions the rest are for doing fun stuff in the open world. Some of my favorites were the ones for getting your car to peel out (hit the gas and the brakes at the same time) and making all of the factions mad at you (I did it by flying an attack helicopter all over the world and shooting everything I could find).

The Bad

• The save system is pointless. You can save your game whenever you want, but when you load it starts you back at the closest base and not exactly where you were.  Also, the game lets you have multiple save slots, but there is no way to load them. The only load option for a single player game is to load the most recent save.
• The vehicle hijacking system is brutally hard. When you go to hijack a car, truck, tank, or helicopter the game starts a button pressing action sequence.  It will pop up a button on the screen that you have to push.  The bigger and better the vehicle the more consecutive buttons you will have to hit.  The big issue with this method of hijacking is that the window to press the buttons is really short.  In most cases I would try to hijack something and then fail because I was not fast enough. I would then attempt to hijack it again and I would get one button press correct. Then, I would try again and get 2 correct.  So, after 3 or 4 tries I would finally hijack the vehicle because I memorized which buttons to press in what order.  Each vehicle has the same button sequence each time you hijack the vehicle type which does help a little.
• A few of the later missions are very hard. These missions tend to be ones where you have three or four steps you need to complete. After completing one or two steps if you die you end up having to restart the whole mission. The game lets you play cooperatively with a friend which helps with the harder missions, but if you don’t have a friend available to help some of the longer missions are very taxing.

Conclusion [7 out of 10]

Mercenaries 2: World in Flames is an enjoyable game mostly because the whole game’s world is open and available to be destroyed.  There are tons of ways to blow things up and plenty of opportunities to use all of the weapons and vehicles at your desposale.  Plus, while there are some missions that are required to advance the main plot line the rest are completely optional. So, Mercenaries 2 lets you play as much as you want and when you get tired of blowing up everything in your path you can wrap up the game’s main play missions and be done.

Editor’s Note: You can check out our original mini-review of Mercenaries 2 if you are interested in some other thoughts about this game as well.