Mercenaries 2: World in Flames – PS2 – Review

Gamers love destruction. We love to engage in
large-scale battles, steal vehicles and weapons that could help us win, and
destroy anything that could hinder our progress. It’s the very foundation
that built Grand Theft Auto, which has been the precedent for most of our
open-world action games. But few titles have been able to approach the level
of destruction introduced by Mercenaries, one of the most creative shooters
to grace the first Xbox and PlayStation 2. And from the moment its
long-awaited sequel – Mercenaries 2: World in Flames – was unveiled, gamers
have been clamoring for more destruction, an element that has been taken
into overdrive on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Just take a glimpse of the
trailers posted
right here on GameZone and you’ll be enamored with the possibilities of
the game Pandemic spent the last three years developing.

However, the beauty, expectations and
inevitable praise lies with the game’s new-gen debut. The Xbox 360 and PS3
versions have already garnered a tremendous amount of attention. Mercenaries
2 is also headed to the PC. But where does that leave the other version,
which was designed for the eight-year-old PS2?

Note: These screens are from
the Xbox 360/PS3 version of Mercenaries 2.

All That’s Glorious

On Sony’s older platform, Mercenaries 2 is
full of run ‘n gun moments that capitalize on the game’s enormous outdoor
environments. While not as big as the Grand Theft Auto cities, you won’t be
confined to one puny locale. During my first or second mission alone, I
screwed up and jumped in the water when I should have stolen a vehicle and
driven along the shoreline. As I pushed the thumbstick forward to swim
toward the mission’s destination — noted on the in-game map, a la GTA – it
became clear that this was going to be a very long swim. This enormous area
is just one small part of the world. Like GTA, you have specific missions
that need to be completed. But the rest is up to you.

Vehicles are an essential part of the
experience, and unlike most open-world games, the controls are really well
done. Steering is generally smooth and most vehicles, even the big trucks,
are easy to maneuver. In this regard, Mercenaries 2 takes more of an arcade
approach, trading in the stiff and/or sluggish feeling that accompanies most
driving games for a quick (and often exaggerated) mechanic that anyone can
grasp on the first try.

Battles unfold with steady streams of
bullets, grenades and other weaponry that will make you hate the thought of
standing still. Only two weapons can be carried at one time (you can thank
Halo for inspiring developers to do that), but there are weapons everywhere
– most commonly next to the corpse of a defeated enemy – to prevent it from
becoming a problem. This is, after all, a shooter more than anything else.
You aren’t conserving ammo like in Resident Evil, or thinking about which
weapons to carry as you might in Halo.

Players with a lousy aim can take advantage
of the auto-target feature that makes killing a breeze. The enemy AI isn’t
too sharp, preventing the need for intelligent battle tactics. But opposing
forces are fairly strong when fighting in great numbers, especially during
an escape or evasion mission. So while the game may seem easy most of the
time (the missions have a straightforward, follow-the-directions setup), you
may occasionally find yourself on the receiving end of a deadly explosion.

All That’s Gray

Imagine a world where the sky changes color
on-the-fly. Nighttime, daytime – who can tell when things adjust
automatically at the game’s whim? Buildings materialize at random, filling
vacant landscapes as necessary. The fog of war is heavily apparent as it
covers the environment like a security blanket, evaporating slowly as you
draw closer to the area masked in a haze. Enemy soldiers are just as
mysterious – they too may appear invisible. At that time, only the bullets
shot from their guns can be seen. And when the enemy charges in uncloaked,
do not be surprised if you see one or more soldiers overwhelmed with a gray
coating. This coating, which resembles the basic character models developers
create before adding skin and clothing textures, can be found throughout
Mercenaries 2.

All of this would be interesting – maybe even
unique and memorable – if it were intentional. But these graphical tidbits
were not the result of clever game-making. They are the unfortunate
byproduct of a game that was made, from the ground up, for Xbox 360 and
PlayStation 3. This is eerily evident at startup when the game begins its
120+ seconds of loading, followed by an additional minute or two of loading
in between missions, and as much as 10 or 15 seconds of loading just to
pause the game or check the map screen. Considering the massive world that
had to be loaded in advance (to prevent mid-mission loading), the first two
times were acceptable for PS2. The pause load times are torture, but gamers
have endured worse for far less.

Then the game actually begins. You take a
look around and discover that the graphics are about five years behind
the first Mercenaries, which was made for PS2, Xbox, and PC. At that
time, Xbox 360 was several months away from its November 05 debut. Thus,
Pandemic – Mercenaries’ creator – was at the helm of Mercenaries 1. Now that
they’ve moved onto PS3 and Xbox 360 development, they did what most
developers do and handed the PS2 version of Mercenaries 2 off to someone
else (a studio by the name of Artificial Mind and Movement, according to the
game’s credits). Weak textures, ugly backdrops, bland explosions… This is
not the Mercenaries you remember playing three years ago.

Nonetheless, bad graphics and lengthy load
times are a small price to pay for a game that’s overflowing with
excitement. In the beginning, that appeared to be where Mercenaries 2 was
headed. But once the oddities began to occur, the game lost its fighting
edge. It wasn’t uncommon to be walking around an outdoor area and suddenly
discover that you were, in fact, walking inside of a large building. The
building wasn’t there initially because of an obvious glitch that should
have been ironed out long before the ship date. But then, out of the blue,
the building appears – just like those invisible enemy soldiers and the
screwy disappearance and reappearance of textures, which makes the game look
like you’re playing a work-in-progress demo, not the finished title heading
to retail.

Missions are harder to complete when you
can’t see the enemy or buildings you’re supposed to find, or when a bridge
isn’t where it’s supposed to be, causing an unprepared player to dive
straight into the water. The game is even more difficult when it freezes,
which was more likely to occur whenever something disappeared. Technically
that should have made it easier for the game to run, as software requires
less processing power when fewer things are displayed on screen. But it
always bogged down the game, and with it, my PS2. As if it that weren’t
frustrating enough, the lengthy load times made it hard to tell the
difference between a freeze and a regular loading phase. Typically when a
game appears to be frozen for more than a minute, you need to shut down your
console. In Mercenaries 2, it may be loading (or temporarily frozen?) for at
least that long. Thus, you’ll just have to wait a while and see what
happens.

And what about the sky changing colors?
Mercenaries 2 uses various lighting and color schemes to enhance the mood of
the game. While cool in concept, the execution is as glitchy as the rest of
the game. Whether entering or exiting a building, crossing a bridge or
diving into the water, you never know when the sky is going to change. One
could assume that this was done on purpose, but when the game is running
normally, the colors blend fairly well from one area to the next.
Unfortunately, Mercenaries 2 runs abnormally more often than not.

Review Scoring Details for Mercenaries 2: World in Flames