Mercenaries 2: World in Flames (X360)

After quite some time in the oven, Pandemic's long-awaited Mercenaries 2: World in Flames is just about ready for release. Building on the widely open and destructible terrain of the 2005 hit, Mercs 2 expands upon the original in more ways than simply better graphics and HD resolution. Amidst the talk about the scope of the game's rendition of a Venezuela in need of overthrow (enough to get the real-life government up in arms), one thing's been fairly overlooked up to this point: the game's co-op, which allows you to eject the regime with a buddy. The game's effectively done at this point, so any glaring issues we noticed will likely stick to the final product, but we think that it'll be a fairly fun romp that should steal away some gamers from other would-be's attempting to don GTA's sandbox crown.

The premise of Mercs 2 isn't particularly far removed from its predecessor. As a mercenary for hire, you're working for whatever dollars come your way. Once again, you'll choose from Christopher Jacobs, Jennifer Mui, or Mattias Nilsson as you utilize each character's assets and weaknesses to get the fattest payday. In this case, drug lord Ramon Solano gives your merc a job, then tries to kill him or her, setting off what our EA rep described as "payback, Mercs-style." We got a sense of this sort of disproportionate counter-attack in our hands-on time with a multiplayer session alongside Pandemic.

Mercs 2's co-op is rooted in a fairly simple premise. Pandemic is more interested in making any 2-player action relevant to the campaign. As a result, co-op's the only multiplayer mode. It's all drop-in, drop-out based, and there's no loading when a buddy drops in. As we witnessed from our session with a member of Pandemic Studios, it's pretty simple to play with a buddy. Not long after we saw him log in, we were in a game, chatting about plans of attack.
We played through two levels in co-op. The first found us attacking enemy stockpiles, then attacking a militia stronghold. The section seemed designed to show off not only the strength and scope of Mercs 2's weaponry, but also how much more efficiently you can slice through a mission with a compatriot. The Venezuelan terrain is vast, to say the least; you'll be looking at four times the land found in the first title. We hopped on some jet skis to get from one section to another. During this time, we noticed some problems with Mercs 2 that seem to befall many sandbox titles: there's some pretty glaring pop-in in the terrain, and some of the visuals don't look super-crisp. On the other hand, the number of destructible objects and buttery 60 frames per second help to balance the other issues, which we don't think will be fixed by release time.

Upon reaching the island in question, the mission was pretty clear: we had to attack a few weapon strongholds and "liberate" some bunker busters to attack a military fortress. Of course, that sounds easier to type than to pull off, especially considering that each bunker busters stockpile was surrounded with swarms of armed soldiers. After clearing out waves of enemies, we called for airlifts to pick up each stack of bombs before moving onto another section. This section of the mission could have been done with one player, but using two players allowed us to split up duties into distraction (shooting at soldiers) and attack (stealing the stockpile) not only streamlined the process, but was a hell of a lot more fun than trudging through the experience solo.

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[Pharm Girl]

spam

[Plissken]

Wow...spam. I will not buy this game

[Cerpin Taxt]

Actually, this game will be fucking unreal if it's an improvement on the first one.

Mercenaries is one of the most under rated/under appreciated games ever.

[Flamingnun]

The first game had awesome content, but was hindered by a shitty control system/lack of variation between blowing up building a/b.

The second looks the shit, coop ftw.




'threads also blatant spam.

[Cerpin Taxt]

Originally Posted by Flamingnun

ftfw

[snowmayne]

yes the second one is going to be fucking amazing.

its showing at e3 was insane.

[Sir-Ex]

lol I love how he drops a grenade in the tank and the hops right in and it still works.