Yet another out of touch game review from me today, this is largely because of the fall of the games developers Pandemic. What happened was, after a couple of unsuccessful games those morons at EA decided to axe poor old Pandemic Studios causing all of the servers that held the Xbox Live and Playstation Network content for Mercenaries 2 to disappear. This was a problem because the game, when connected to said online networks, automatically tried to sign into the servers, causing the game to crash. At least this is the wild theory that I arrived at after both my brother’s and my own copies of the game repeating crashed whilst trying to sign on to the Playstation Network and Xbox Live respectively.
Needless to say then that my early experiences of the game were extremely poor. When I first actually got the damned thing working, I was less than impressed. The gaming world seemed just too big, I had the same problem when I owned Just Cause – it just made the game so tricky to play because of the sheer size of it. It was difficult to find the same place twice and hard to navigate. Come to think of it Grand Theft Auto 4 had a similar problem. After a while I gave up and it sat in a box in my room gathering dust.
However, it’s rebirth into my life happened only a couple of days ago after I’d gained all the achievements for Fallout 3 and all but two that I can’t get for Fable II. I was left with my favourite two games that I had nothing more to achieve with either of them, it was a sad moment. Then I thought to myself ’I really feel like blowing a lot of shit up’. Mercenaries 2! perfect. I loved the original, probably my favourite game on the PS2. I started a new game and commenced my single handed destruction political realignment of Venezuela.
This time around, I just got over the early navigation issues and got on with the first few missions. After a while the navigation gets a lot easier because you simply get used to the map and in game world – also you almost trip over helicopters everywhere you go. I can say that using a high powered tactical strike to blow up one building, and in fact taking out several city blocks in the process, is the most fun thing to do ever. Possibly even more fun than Portal. After a couple of missions, I moved on to taking out key targets and any VZ military bases that I happened to stumble across. The story is very similar to that of the first game, you get betrayed then you use three factions to kill and destroy everything in the world. The factions are even backed by the same people and have the same hatreds of others from the first game. The Russians are backing Jamaican Pirates for some reason, The Chinese are backing the People’s Liberation Army of Venezuela again for some strange reason, and of course the Yanks are backing the big oil company Universal Petroleum. They all wanted you to capture each others bases and personnel and generally just kill any members of the VZ Army.
I haven’t got around to completing the game at the time of reviewing, but I can safely say that all the bad guys are going to get a rifle shoved where the sun doesn’t shine and walls are going to be redecorated very much in their personal image. I can’t wait to keep playing, but after about 7 hours of constant playing I’ve decided to have a break for a while, besides my girlfriend’s just got back from work and I’d rather spend time with her to be honest. Nevertheless I’d still rate Mercenaries 2 8/10 I think.
CraigE
