Mercenaries 2: World in Flames (Xbox 360)

The maxim of Mercenaries 2: huge open world, massive destruction and over the top action, no rules except those that you make yourself. It sounds too good to be true doesn’t it? Well, it’s true, you can go anywhere, do anything and as long as you can handle the consequences, you’ll be fine.

The game is great, it does however have faults. The achievement system is broken; some people can go online with friends and get achievements they’re not supposed to get. Some can suddenly find that they’re blocked from picking up other achievements. There are some cases where a user has unlocked every achievement in the game just by playing for an hour. These kinds of glitches are things that should have been nailed from the get-go by EA’s Q&A team.

Whilst the physics system is robust it’s also glitchy as well, we’ve seen several strange behaviours in single player involving vehicles that vanish through the PMC helipad roof (Ewan’s chopper if you ask him to fetch any strikes or cash local to the PMC). Vehicles have exploded for no reason, not an RPG trooper in sight. A few floating helicopters caused us to chuckle as they hung there in the sky, exactly as bricks don’t (HHGttG reference there: Ed).

The player model has been stuck in some rocks and so on. There also needs to be a tweak to the damage model from slides, you can slide a few feet sometimes and take no damage, other times you can take 10-20 points from a slight trip. Again, these are things that should have been sorted out before the game went to retail.

The AI needs some work as well, your chopper pilot isn’t too bad, apart from when he sometimes doesn’t come when you call him, hangs around trying to lift a fuel tank and then vanishes without a trace. Enemy AI is too aggressive when it comes to firing RPGs, they shoot those things like they’re shooting a machine gun most of the time, whilst you have to go through a reload animation just to shoot one rocket. The enemy AI makes stealth damn near impossible and Jen, who is supposed to be covert, doesn’t get a chance to shine in that respect. Any AI that can see through six tonnes of rock is either superhuman or badly programmed.

The accuracy on player weapons needs a few tweaks since it can take a clip or so to put down one VZ soldier with some of them. Whereas the machine pistol is a veritable killing machine from close or long range. There are moments where the AI also loses the ability to navigate, bumps into walls, shoots the wall with an RPG and kills itself (thank you Mr. HVT with an rpg for robbing me of my perfect capture record) or flies a helicopter around and around on the spot in circles for an hour.

These glitches don’t just happen in single player either, there’s a whole list of them for multiplayer as well. A great highlight would be where the physics system seemed to forget how c4 worked for a moment and detonated the explosion aimed at the building we were standing on, instead of the fuel tanks we’d placed 5 blocks of c4 on several hundreds of feet away.

It would be impossible to list every glitch and bug we tracked down, most are minor and some are just things that we wish the developers had thought of. Yes it’s great to be able to grapple a chopper that your friend is flying, but how about the ability for us to reel the grapple in and climb into that vehicle with said friend? I don’t mind hanging around like Spider-Man on the underside of his chopper but it’s like they forgot to add something decent in the animation: most of the time the character runs on the spot as he swings around.