Mercenaries knows that it's story is not going to win any awards for originality, in fact, I think Just Cause called and wants it's plot back. Possibly Just Cause stole from Mercenaries 1 but we won't play that game here.
The story revolves around Matthias who is a mercenary funnily enough. He does some work for the Venezuelan leader Ramon Solano and is double crossed for his trouble. Narrowly escaping with his life and suffering a dignity crippling bullet in the ass, our explosion happy merc vows revenge.
Finding Solano again proves harder than first thought and Matthias must get into bed with various factions to gain intelligence. These factions want jobs carried out of course and we are soon emboiled with the likes of the people liberation army of Venezuela and Universal petroleum. For the most part we are fighting the Venezuelan army which is loyal to Solano.
As the plot thicken and the explosions get bigger the flow of oil from Venezuela is threatened and the big boys arrive in the form of the Chinese army and the Allied nations.
Things go from bad to worse and all we want to do is find Solano, get revenge and get out. Not so much of a good time for Matthias, hwoever there is the little diversion of being paid a fortune to blow things up, which if Matthias is honest is what he lives for.
The characters are varied and interesting. Fiona is your handler and sweet soothing female voice in our ear at all times. There are supporting characters like Misha your drunken fighter pilot, who are there for light relief. There is a fairly good sense of humor in the game which suggests that they didn't take it all that seriously. It feels like the writers went out for laughs and that fans of the game only want to blow things up as much as possible.
There are three characters to choose from and each one has an advantage, such as being able to carry more ammo or run faster. The character choice doesn't have much impact other than on aesthetics. If you like to watch a female run around shooting rather than a male seems to be sum total of the choice.
Mercenaries 2 is an open world game, set on the island of Venezuela, I can't vouch for any accuracy to the landscape but it does seem pretty and fairly realistic. The islands are populated with cities, and small towns. There are the usual roads and waterways to create havoc in. You can drive a huge array of boats, cars, bikes, and helicopters. The only thing not open to you is jets, they are reserved for your pilot who provides you with air-strikes. You can grapple onto passing helicopters and winch yourself up to them, which makes them as easy to find as cars and really makes getting around the island easier when you get to the later missions where you hop around the whole island.
Early in the game you take over a mansion belonging to the bad guy and set up your base. From your base you can call your pilots to come and pick you up or pick up any resources lying around the map. Resources become increasingly important. Dotted around the map are oil, cash and equipment. When you find it you tag it for your pilot and they will come and pick it up. Though you have to be careful of stealing it from factions as they will try and stop your pilot. Once you have oil you can call air-strikes which certainly do make the missions easier. Certain missions require certain items and the mission giver usually will supply them. There is also a suggested ordinance load-out for each mission which is entirely up to you to follow or not. Money earned allows you to buy weapons in the shop which can be equipped or dropped to you in the field by your pilots.
The missions themselves range from stealing weapons and vehicles, rescuing kidnapped VIP's, setting up listening devices, freeing bases from army occupation, and defending buildings and people. Simply stated there isn't much there but each mission is made up of a combination of objectives and feel varied.
By far the most common mission is taking bases for the factions from the army. These missions consist of you making your way to a heavily defended base, working your way inside and taking out any anti-air resistance so that you can call in the attacking factions helicopters which deposit their soldiers. Once inside the soldiers enter the base until enough are inside to take it and the base is yours.
The game plays similar to the Club, third person view, no cover system etc. Fast running and gunning, generous health and quick kills. The weapons are standard, though fairly destructive. Machine guns, grenade and rocket launchers etc. There are also grenades and c4 type explosives. The weapons really come into their own when you are allowed the larger air-strikes like cruise missiles and bunker busters which can bring down tower blocks.
In addition to the story missions there are plenty of side missions to accomplish, and if you were really dedicated this game would take some time to complete to 100%. There are race missions, challenge mission and hundreds of what are termed high visibility targets to eliminate for each faction. There are also key buildings in each city area to be demolished for the factions.
Each faction gives you a rating and their love for you will increase as you do their jobs, consequently jobs begin to infringe on each others territories and sometimes you end up angering a faction in the course of your work for another. This results in the factions starting to shoot at you on sight when you anger them enough. Keep them sweet and whole chunks of the map become safe zones, get on the wrong side and bullets are coming at you wherever you go. You can be sneaky however, when a faction member sees you shooting up their men or equipment they will report you by radio. You can see and hear the person doing this, they have a red flash above their head. If you kill them before they get the message of then your standing does not change.
For the most part once you get into a mission area there are a finite amount of troops to kill before you complete an objective. One thing to watch for is the buildings which contain rocket troopers. These buildings have enemies shooting from their windows. The problem is that you can go around them and shoot all the men inside, however they will re-spawn until the building itself is destroyed. This is where taking enough heavy ordinance comes in handy as having a huge array of explosives certainly makes things easier.
The game also rewards creative interpretation of your approach, you can take it slowly and snipe lots of enemies coming in on foot and taking a calm measured approach, or you can also scream in on a flaming helicopter, order in a bucketload of air-strikes and barely survive the mayhem that ensues, it's all up to you own playing style.
All is not well at times though, I did notice some glitches. A.i. characters in missions not behaving as they should and running amok when they should be following you. I found a glitch in the menus that stopped me buying extra fuel storage several times and corrupted the menu until i went back to the game and then back to the menu.
Worst of all, which isn't really a glitch, but was annoying was the oil rig mission. The mission sees you boarding an oil rig and trying to reach a certain room in it to trigger a cut scene, which then sees you do battle with a character and take his picture to verify his death. The problem lies with the destructibility of the environment. The enemies fire at you indiscriminately with rockets which do tremendous damage to the rig structure, which led to me being unable to actually get to my objective as the stairs were taken out. A few times the whole rig would explode before I could get to the mission checkpoint.
The a.i. is average for an open world game, with enemies mostly running straight at you or staying in one spot and shooting at you. There are no real boss fights unless you count the quicktime event scenes that occur at certain peak story points. Quicktime is also involved whenever you try and steal a tank or helicopter.
The design of the islands is fairly organic and there has been a lot of care lavished on making cities, shanties and natural areas all look and feel real world. The design is simplistic compared to the care lavished on say Liberty city, but not as simplistic as say The Godfather.
The game engine is smooth for the most part, however I would not expect it to falter as the game is obviously running in sub HD resolutions and not really taxing anything in respect to amount of entities on screen.
Sound is fairly average. Nothing I can really comment on as bad, but nothing that peaked my interest either.
As with most open world games checkpoints come at the end of each mission. There are also some checkpoints mid mission which is a real lesson for Rockstar.
One of the best features of the game is the ability to bring a friend into your game at any time. This is a really fun feature and as long as you revive a downed player in 45 seconds you really make the game much easier with combined firepower. There is no traditional multiplayer, which is really not a fault as open world games tend to bore me with their much to large maps for death-match.
I obtained 735 achievement points for one play-through of the main story-line. I also played some co-op missions with a friend and helped him finish his game from about the halfway point of the story. I played for about 20-30 hours over a nine day period.
It's good clean explosive fun, A game that I enjoyed, but from the point of view of someone who requires excellence rather than just a good time for their £40 then it's a rental rather than a buy.
Scoring
Graphics 7
Gameplay 8
Story 7
Level Design 8
A.i. 5
Total 7.0
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