Mercenaries 2 on Xbox 360 is fun (and frustrating)
Ever since I finished the greatest game in the history of human civilization (and possibly the universe), Fallout 3, I’ve been playing Mercenaries 2 on my XBOX 360. I like the premise of the game (which is that you blow things up with a wide variety of small arms, explosives, vehicles, and munitions), but the execution is a bit flawed.
Those who know me well know I am easily entertained by wonton destruction. One of the things that I love to do in Crackdown is to camp out on an overpass, shooting out the tires of the cars below, creating an ever-larger pile up, then peppering the road with explosive barrels and lobbing a grenade into the mix. I was hoping for a similarly visceral rampage experience in Mercs 2, and from time to time it delivers.
I love calling in artillery strikes to level a building, or sending in a tank-killer to wipe enemy heavy armor from the map, and I especially love flying about Venezuela in an attack helicopter unleashing rockets and barrages of minigun rounds on unsuspecting tangos below. However the game strays from this proven formula too often in the form of road or boat races along the main story line which one must complete to move forward. I hate racing games, which is why I’m playing Mercenaries 2 and not Forza. I’m fine with little side quests and mini-games that cross genres to keep things interesting, but forcing me to race around on a fucking jet ski just so I can get back to blowing shit up is maddening.
I also find the game lacks some polish. For example, the game save GUI is clunky, and you can’t load a saved game without quitting the current game and navigating to the save game mangement view. Further more, while the game lets you save at any time, if you’re in the middle of a contract the game will load only as far as the last checkpoint, and does not reflect where you were at the time of the save.
I also find the lack of persistence in the game annoying. Perhaps I was spoiled by Fallout 3′s mind-blowing success in this regard, where I could drop a pistol in a room somewhere in the world, come back days or weeks or months later, and find the pistol exactly where I left it. Still, it irritates me when I spend cash and fuel to get a Rogue Assassin helo, park it on the helipad, go get a contract fron a contact, and discover my helo is now gone. Lame.
Though there’s not much need to farm resources to move forward in the game, what little there is is still too much. For a game about blowing shit up, there’s an awful lot of drugery involved. For example, why must I constantly seek out fuel? Why can’t I buy it with my many millions of dollars? It’s not like this adds any challenge to the game; I just fly in my UP helo to the nearest UP camp, grab their fuel tank with my grapple while they still think I’m a UP unit, and fly off to a nearby safe LZ to get the oil extracted. What’s next, stopping three times a day to get food for my character? If I wanted to dwell on banal minutiae, I’d live my actual life.
I’ll keep playing Mercs 2 because overall it’s a fun game, and the co-op multiplayer is even moreso, but it could have been so much better.