Missions and enemies are also severely unbalanced, leading to the realisation that you can act as a one-man army for the majority of the time. The decision to place gas and brake controls on the face buttons is also completely baffling in this age of controller triggers - no alternative schemes are on offer. Collisions can be entertaining, or simply jerk the temperamental physics engine into producing cars that float 50 yards upside down – on numerous occasions.
Vehicle handling is average at very best and appalling at worst. This shoddy approach continues to permeate almost every facet of the experience from transport to AI. The skybox texture for the sun, as an example, looks simply painted on at low resolution rather than brandishing any source of light – let alone any HDR effects. Texturing is largely flat and uninteresting, and whilst draw distance is impressive from the viewpoint of a helicopter clipping the clouds, it all looks a little workmanlike and uninspired. Animation is rough around the edges, with choppy transitions that look more at home in the early days of last generation than a 2008 blockbuster. Unfortunately for all the promise that variety brings, Mercs 2 undoubtedly feels rushed. Transport around the map can be sped up using a helicopter, and each base of operation offers numerous activities in the vicinity to keep you busy.
As with the original, you're free to piss off whichever rival factions you choose, making your traversal across the land as carefree or competitive as you'd like. A fairly short narrative is present and correct, along with a host of extraneous activities such as races, stealth missions and turf capturing. Explosions are pretty much the raison d'etre here, with the engine doing a decent job of rendering objects to pieces and raining down particles in the process.Īs an open-world title, Mercs 2 checks all the necessary structural boxes. Pretty much any structure can be levelled within the game, either through a combination of RPG fire and C4, or some of the more industrial hardware and special abilities - such as the artillery strike.
Things improve further when you realise the sheer level of destructibility on offer.
As a 3rd-person playground, large-scale Venezuela isn't a bad proposition, offering everything from skyscrapers to dense jungle across a huge and teeming map. Weapons can be picked up, air strikes called in, Motorbikes and tanks stolen, cars commandeered and disguises adopted whenever and wherever you like. Basic third-person controls wrap around an easy targeting system and satisfactory level of responsiveness, along with an acute sense that objects in the world are simply there to be played with. But when most of your key features are trumped by the ageing Just Cause, something is horribly awry.įocussing on the jovial spirit of simply blowing shit up, Mercs 2 lays out its stall early on. From the lacklustre visual design to the horridly sporadic audio, you'd expect more polish from a title in development this long - after all, this a genre that has the likes of GTA IV and Saints Row to compete with. Much like the technology on show in Pandemic's latest open-world destructathon, Mercenaries 2 has an air of 2006 about it.