I absolutely adore Paul Verhoeven's future-schlock gore-fest Starship Troopers. It's got zero class, rubbish dialogue, violence by the skip load and some of the worst acting you're ever likely to encounter - but it gets away with being so bad because a) it has the aforementioned icky violence and b) underneath the exploding guts and scenery chewing it has a solid sense of humour. It's unpretentious and uncomplicated, filling some deep seated need a lot of us have for the occasional bout of unfettered blood letting and explosions (in a fictional setting of course) to give us a break from our other pretentious and complicated tastes. For me, Mercenaries 2 (Mercs 2), Pandemic's new sandbox action game, is exactly the same as Troopers in this regard, minus the giant bugs and the awesome Michael Ironside.
The premise is simple. You're a mercenary, setting up shop in Venezuela mid-coup only to get done over by a client at the end of a contract. Understandably, you don't take this well, and set out on a path of revenge to take down the men who betrayed you. To fund your PMC (Private Military Corporation) you can take on work for any of several factions operating in the country, doing dirty jobs for the likes of jungle guerrillas and international oil companies as you scrape together the cash and the weaponry to exact some nasty retribution on the greasy ponce who screwed you over and took control of the country. What this translates to in terms of actual gameplay is this: blow some stuff up, get paid, blow some more stuff up, get paid, buy bigger bombs, blow some more stuff... And so on.
Explosions are the meat and potatoes of Mercs 2, and the developers understand this perfectly. They've provided you with everything from grenade launcher-armed SUVs to laser-guided bunker buster bombs, then sat back and said "go on, have a go." It pays lip service to GTA and its clones with sandbox staples like hijackable vehicles, free roaming, plentiful side missions and the occasional fiddly race-against-the-clock challenges. But with a near fully-destructible environment and munitions liberally scattered across the Venezuelan countryside that you can collect and deploy with a couple of mouse clicks it's quite clear where the game's heart really lies. Airstrikes, artillery barrages, tank busters, supply drops, vehicle drops (including tanks); all these can be called down by you in the field at a moment's notice. Enemy trucks, tanks and even aircraft can all be hijacked in the event your own ride explodes (and it will, repeatedly). In fact, it’s fair to say that nearly everything in Mercs 2 eventually explodes. Vehicles are disposable playthings, soldiers only there to provide moving targets.
So, Mercs 2 is shallower than a children's paddling pool. It's got one hook, explosions, and it employs that with aplomb and explosions make it worth playing. It's just a shame that the same effort clearly wasn't put into the rest of the package. For a game that's almost one hundred percent action, actual combat with the enemy doesn't hold up very well. There's no cover system, which is a surprising omission in a modern third-person action game. There's also, strictly speaking, no crouch button either. The only way to duck behind anything is to aim down your weapon's sight, at which point your character will drop to one knee. But do this behind cover and you can't fire back with any accuracy because, if you try and take aim, pressing fire causes your character to pop up a little and that throws your cross hair off. It's infuriating, compounded further by the fact that most of the guns in the game couldn't hit the broadside of a battle tank. Don't expect to hit anything with the RPG unless you fire it point blank either. The whole system feels not just a bit broken, but unfinished, like the basics are in place but nothing has been tuned properly.
The same can be said for pretty much everything else. The AI, both friend and foe, seems to know what it has to do, but will be damned if it knows how to do it. On several missions you'll be able to call in troop support from the faction you're fighting for, to help you capture objectives. But you'll frequently find that the NPCs simply stand around after disembarking from their chopper, or that they run off ledges or roofs and get themselves killed, or some times they just fail to get out of the chopper at all. They can't drive, fight or even run away properly. What's worse, it seems like every NPC in the game has to share the same four lines of dialogue, and will spout them at the slightest provocation, looping them until you bugger off, or you shoot them. The game simply doesn't have as much voice work as was clearly needed.
Mercs 2 is also one of the buggiest releases I've played in quite a while (second only to Stalker: Clear Sky). Inconsistent physics, clipping issues, graphical glitches, broken missions - again, it feels like the developers pushed the game out 3 months early and hid it from their QA department. Online co-op? Couldn't test it because I couldn't connect to anyone I wanted to play with, and had to keep kicking random douchebags from my game. It's also not optimised for the PC either. It's a dodgy port - the menus are unresponsive to mouse clicks half the time, aiming with the mouse sometimes doesn’t work, a lot of the texturing is sub-par even on maximum settings, there’s a lot of pop-in and the game turns to a slideshow if you have the temerity to turn on the graphics option labelled “Water Effects” – and this on a rig that can cream Crysis.
There’s a whole host of other small problems to do with the difficulty and mission design but if you can come to terms with the above then you can deal with them too. Mercs 2 is, in a word, shoddy. It’s also a sequel, making a lot of the niggles less forgivable, and they haven’t bothered to port it to the PC properly. Can you ultimately get over it? To an extent yes, because it still remains a jolly old jaunt when you’re pasting the enemy with cluster bombs every five minutes. It has the good grace to remember to be fun and the sense not to take itself too seriously. Mercs 2 never overcomes its handicaps, but it makes the experience at its core enjoyable enough for you to forget about them for a while. I can’t possibly recommend you pay full price for it (as I did) but in a couple of months when the price has come down and it has (hopefully) been patched it will be well worth an install.
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