

Worse yet, for whatever reason the game actually makes you push a button to pick up ammo and items dropped by fallen enemies. When it comes to destroying anything big you might as well find something other than your gun to get the job done. When it comes right down to it, there's really no reason for you to use your gun outside of killing the mindless soldiers that are roaming the countryside. For whatever reasons, all of the guns feel underpowered. It doesn't seem to matter which gun you use, each and every one of them is practically useless. It all starts the moment you have to fire your guns. Sadly it never comes back, and you are ultimately left with an action game that doesn't even come close to hitting the mark.

I found myself spending the rest of the time playing Mercenaries 2 trying to get the feeling of the first hour back. However, like a whirlwind romance, it's just as easy to fall out of love with Mercenaries 2. It's all enough to get your blood pumping, which is why it's easy to fall in love with this game early on. In the first hour or so you'll play through a lot of really exciting missions, killing all sorts of nasty bad guys, ordering air strikes and blowing up enormous buildings. It's what you do in that world that is so disappointing. As it is, Venezuela is a promising location with more than enough diverse environments. In fact, some might argue that the country is a little too big, but we'll leave that argument for later in the review.
MERCENARIES 2 PC CONTROLS FULL
Mercenaries 2 takes place in Venezuela, a real world location that is full of forests, hills, cities and more. Sadly the same cannot be said about this messy sequel. I'll admit it, what the first game allowed you to do was a welcome change of pace. You can't ignore the appeal of blowing up buildings, especially when its you in a tank trying to take out the back guys shooting at you from windows. The reason everybody has such fond memories of the first game was because it managed to mix the Grand Theft Auto-style of gameplay with the ability to blow up every single thing in the world. It's as if every character has been made with the idea in mind that there needs to be at least one thing about them that makes them unbearable. Outside of those very small personal traits, these three characters are essentially the same. The three characters consist of Mattias Nilsson (a chaos-loving crazy man who can regenerate health faster than anybody else), Chris Jacobs (an African American action hero who can carry a lot of ammo) and Jennifer Mui (the fast walking woman). How can this not be the plot to one of the greatest games of all time? On paper this is a premise that can't lose, since it allows you to work both sides, meet all sorts of sleazy characters and sneak into enemy outposts. You play one of three mercenaries, private contractors who fly into a dangerous locale and perform military-like actions for money. There are still good ideas found in this game, but in order to appreciate them you are going to have to put up with a lot of repetitive gameplay and clumsy controls.Īt least the basic premise of the game is sound. What we have here is a game that feels a lot like the first game, but is full of strange design choices and some ugly graphics. Unfortunately something very, very bad happened on the way to finalizing Mercenaries 2. What did Pandemic do to that game I've been waiting to play through?

This isn't the game I was drooling over all those years ago. Fast forward almost a few years and what we're left with is an ugly game full of technical problems. The idea of having an entire country to blow up was certainly intriguing, and coupled with these amazing graphics the combination felt like it couldn't fail.
MERCENARIES 2 PC CONTROLS TV
I can remember sitting there looking at the screenshots wondering if my TV would even be able to handle such beautiful detail. Mercenaries 2 is best known for being one of the first games announced for a next-generation console.

It's not just the minor bugs and the repetitive gameplay, it's also the big design decisions that turn what should have been a fun take on the Grand Theft Auto-style sandbox game into one of the most disappointing games of this generation.īut let's push pause and rewind the tape a little. But that's not the case, because the longer you play Mercenaries 2 the more annoying the whole thing gets. If this review was based on just the first hour of gameplay then I would be sitting here wholeheartedly recommending Pandemic's long-awaited sequel to one of the best games on the original Xbox.
