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  Mercenaries 2: World in Flames [PS3 Review]

  Navneet Prakash, Sep 22, 2008 1753 hrs IST

  Meet interesting people, blow them up. If you like explosions, this is the game for you

  Tons of explosions, huge array of vehicles and weapons, solid frame-rate and no load-times, looks good

  Bad voice acting, plethora of glitches and bugs, dumb AI

  Expert Rating :

  

  

Page 1 - Introduction Page 2 - Everything goes BOOM Page 3 - Of bad bugs and worse voice acting

The first thing you do is break-in and capture Solano's old mansion, which acts as your base of operations. Solano has become more powerful and is now controlling Venezuela, so taking him down means help from others. The "others" are various factions that are spread out through the city. You have to meet the heads of various factions and do favors for them, in return the factions help you by providing funds as well as info about Solano's operations. You will also end up recruiting other mercs who can take care of menial tasks like dropping a nuke or picking up 100k in cash. So the basic game consists of doing the various factions' bidding and retrieving more info about Solano's operations. The missions will take you to various parts of the city, but traveling is a breeze since you can steal any vehicle, GTA style.

The game will offer you missions constantly, there are times when you will bump into as many as three side missions while traveling to a particular spot. The game's pacing and regular missions keep you hooked on. There are numerous weapons available, which you pick up from fallen enemies. You can carry two guns and two types of grenades. I would suggest always carrying an RPG, as it is by far the most destructive weapon. To be honest I am very surprised that the game only allows two weapons. Given the scope of destruction and mayhem, limiting weapons just doesn't fit right. As mentioned earlier, you will be recruiting three more mercs to be a part of your team, which includes a helicopter pilot. Once you recruit the pilot, you can pick up loads of cash as well as tanks of fuel that can be found near enemy bases. You need fuel for transit to friendly helipads as well as for air strikes. Your team also consists of a jet pilot as well as a very qualified mechanic.

Every time you enter an enemy camp or a rival faction, get ready for hordes of enemies who constantly keep spawning and barrage you with bullets. The enemy AI is downright dumb, the creeps in 8-bit Mario games had better coordination. Fortunately, they come in large groups and they keep coming, so at times they can pose some challenge. The enemy can act really dumb, it's not always you see two enemies blowing themselves up with their own grenades. The AI in general acts dumb, like for example, I remember running over a couple of soldiers from one of the factions called the Jamaican Pirates while on a neutral mission, this was in front of another bunch of their "colleagues", and none of them reacted.
To avoid confusion, let me make it clear, when you hurt a personnel from any of the factions in the city, you lose their support and they are after you with whatever they have in reserve. Your objective after that is to get back on their good side by either killing members of their enemy faction or do a mission for them. But throughout the game, there were times when I would run over members of a faction, while there were others standing near-by. This is just one example, there are many more bugs and glitches. Sometimes you get shot at by a faction for roaming around in one of their vehicles, which is quite normal. The only issue is that you were given the car by their faction leader.

In all, there are about five factions and you will constantly be changing sides to get more info and to make more money. The money is used to buy support items as well other goodies that help you blow stuff up. You have to be careful as you will lose a lot of money for making the silliest mistakes like running over an innocent civilian. The entire population in this virtual Venezuela seems to be part of some big family or a result of a major cloning experiment, coz they all look almost the same and speak the same dialogues, but in different voices. It's really irritating when you hear the same thing again and again, but in different voices.

Page 1 - Introduction Page 2 - Everything goes BOOM Page 3 - Of bad bugs and worse voice acting

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