Overview
Mercenaries 2: World in Flames is an open world third person shooter - it's similar to the original with some enjoyable enhancements and occasional frustrating bugs.

Review
Mercenaries 2: World in Flames (M2) is a sprawling open world third person shooter.  If you missed the first one it has a GTA3 type feel with an open environment and lots of misssions/races/etc.  Not quite as open but it does have factions you can play off against each other or try to keep them all happy.  I played this game on the PS3 but there are also PS2, PC and XBox360 versions.

I really enjoyed this game at first and really wanted it to be one of my favourite games ever but the bugs I experienced prevented that.  The game itself crashed about 10 times while I was playing it through (the first game to do this on the PS3 for me) and I had the annoying instance of buying and requesting a vehicle drop off only for nothing to happen!  I also experienced some bugs in the resource pick up operation too.  These bugs occurred many times (I would say more than 50).  In the days when your console is plugged into the internet and you get updates to games leaving bugs like this in the game is unforgivable.  While I'm being critical there is NOT enough variety in the things people say to you - you get REALLY sick of Fiona going on about taking the company public!

The plot was entertaining, the Australian voice actually didn't sound like an American doing a bad Steve Irwin impersonation and the various characters representing the factions were believeable and/or funny.

The main action includes driving around in various cars, bikes, jeeps, tanks, helicopters, etc and using them to blow things up!  Everything in this game can be destroyed - EVERYTHING.  The variety of vehicles and capabilities makes the game fun and the interactive cutscenes you get when you try to take more powerful vehicles are a fun and interesting challenge.  My personal favourites were the chinese artillery and rocket tanks which you can use to destroy from a distance.

There are various factions you can do missions for but often doing missions for one will piss off one of the others, unless you're beating on the VZ that nobody minds!  One piece of advice - finish all missions for a given faction rather than trying to balance things - if you try to keep them all happy by doing one mission for each you'll just end up in trouble - far easier to only have to repair the relationship once!

Some of the best fun is just cruising around the map nicking ordanence and fuel from various factions and testing out the vehicles - I think I probably spent more time out of missions than in.

You can also run around without a vehicle and kick the crap out of your enemies - and that's what you'll do because it's often easier to use the melee attack on soldiers than that cool weapon you just shelled out a fortune for.

This game is awesome fun at the start but the repetition and bugs kick in mid to late game and you get a little sick of the aforementioned issues.

This game does have trophy support.

The game has seems to periodically pop up on various websites for about $40, at that price it's recommended.  Hopefully soon it will go platinum and you can get it for even less!  Keep an eye out on the internet - maybe they'll do a patch to fix the bugs and then the game would bump up to an A.

Rating: B

Good
- Open flexible action!

- Good plot and voice acting (except for repetition)

- Fun Vehicles

- Blowing everything up.

- Nothing is as cool as tossing a beacon over your shoulder to call in a devestating airstrike!

Bad
- Bugs!

- Overpowered Melee attack.

- Repetitive Voice Acting.

Supported Resolutions
720p (HDTV)
480p/576p (EDTV)
480i/576i (SDTV)

Mr Staypuft
Old School Gamer

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