Mercenaries 2: World in Flames (Xbox 360)

Before this turns into a massive rant on the glitches, Mercenaries 2 is a good looking game; there is some pop-in and pop-up. We didn’t spot any frame-rate drops even when things got utterly insane and the special effects for the explosions, damage, over the top destruction are excellent. The fire is some of the best we’ve seen in a game and the way it spreads to flammable objects is great. The animations are good, the hijacking animations are the highlight of the whole thing and each vehicle has its own style of animation to make things interesting.

When the physics and ragdoll systems work properly, they look good. There are times when the player ragdoll produces some unexpected hilarious results as you’re blown around by a rocket strike or something heavy like a tank shell (thank Pandemic for making your health regenerate in this one). Every building can be blown up and comes apart in different ways, sometimes they come apart completely and other times they might take another rocket, strike, tank shell or impromptu c4+fuel tank bomb to take down.

The voice acting is great, with Jennifer Hale (Jennifer Mui), Phil Lamarr (Chris Jacobs) and Peter Stormare (Matthias Nielsen) reprising their roles along with India Dupre as Fiona Taylor.

The music is solid and the sound work is excellent, with many decent spot effects and good chunky explosive sound effects to complement the on screen action.

Mercenaries 2 allows for jump-in, jump-out cooperative play. But the kicker is that EA have region locked the online portion of the game just like Army of Two, only their region locking censorship extends to preventing PAL regions from playing with each other. So PAL UK and PAL UK is fine, PAL UK and NTSC is a no go. So are PAL German and Pal Italian. So they are effectively limiting the Xbox Live experience and cutting the gaming community off from friends who might want to play the game together. I know I wanted to play with a friend of mine in the US, but I can’t.

Apart from that the game is much better with another player, you can both rain destruction. You spawn into the game on foot or in the same vehicle as your friend and there are cooperative gunnery seats in most vehicles allowing for some great teamwork. Add to this the fact that your buddy can revive you if you go down and vice-a-versa you have a solid MP experience. Anything you earn from your friend’s game is automatically added back in as cash/and/or fuel to your save as well as a bonus, so you can earn millions from helping out a friend and use that money to blow the crap out of everything back in your saved game.

Mercenaries 2 is a great but flawed game, it could have been a true kick-ass title but in the end it’s let down by some poor design choices, a lack of thought in terms of certain elements, censorship in terms of ragdoll physics for some countries and the kicker is the region locked multiplayer preventing regions from other PAL regions from playing together. I have to say that EA have made some poor choices in this respect.

Roll on Mercenaries 3.