To give you a general idea of the sheer destructive fun to be had in Mercenaries 2: World in Flames, consider this: at the very beginning of my hands-on demo at E3 2008, I hijacked a tank. Guided through a quick-time event via a series of on-screen button presses, I leapt onto the armored behemoth's main cannon, ran along the barrel to the cockpit, pried open the hatch with brute strength, disarmed the vehicle's pistol-toting pilot who emerged to combat me, grabbed a grenade off of HIS chest, and threw the armed explosive into the breach -- while foiling the pilot's efforts to close the hatch and save his crew with a well-placed foot in the door.
And this was the least exciting thing I did during my twenty-minute tour of Venezuela.
Though the quick-time events are fun, fairly cinematic and worthy of most anything you've seen in God of War -- director Cameron Brown told me that a former member of the Kratos team had a hand in their creation -- they are decidedly linear, and linear is not the name of this game. Like Grand Theft Auto, Mercs 2 derives its greatest pleasures from allowing players to mess around in a huge open environment... only instead of trying for trick jumps and mowing down cops in North America, you're bombing our southern neighbors back to the Stone Age with airstrikes, artillery and a wide variety of military hardware. It's this sandbox gaming experience that Pandemic is most focused on improving, and judging by the build I saw at E3 they've succeeded admirably in a number of ways.
Destructibility
While there's still no terrain deformation, Mercenaries' claim to fame was the ability to reduce almost everything you see to rubble, and Mercs 2 ain't fixing what weren't broke. While Brown told me that you can't necessarily reduce the burnt out remains of destroyed buildings and wreckage to even smaller fragments, when I asked him which things weren't destructible the list was very short: "There's pretty much nothing this time. I think there's a couple of rocks."
As I cruised around a Venezuelan city in my newly acquired tank, I greatly enjoyed the newfound ability to plow through trees, the visible signs of partial destruction even before bashed buildings outright collapse in a billowing cloud of particulate, and the hilarious Havok 5.5 physics in play when sending vehicles, buildings, NPCs and even in-game advertisements to a fiery grave. The gentleman whose turn preceded mine even managed to destroy a gigantic offshore oil rig -- an island in itself -- and I watched in awe as large pieces broke off the structure before it sank beneath the waves.
Control
Open-world games are rarely known for having vehicles that are easy and/or fun to control, but it's looking like Mercs 2 may be an exception. On Xbox 360, my tank felt solid, heavy and very powerful rolling around town, the turret-mounted cannon neither jerky nor oversensitive when aiming with the right analog stick. Helicopter piloting was a breeze, but I was especially impressed when testing out the game's sports car. Fast and agile, the sleek vehicle had no weapons (nor the ability to use your Merc's existing hand cannons to fire out the sides) but was fun enough to drive and such a far cry from automobiles in most other open-world games that I spent a few minutes just reveling in my ability to speed down streets and drift around corners while buildings burned in the background.
Even the game's run and gun third-person shooting controls seem nice and tight, but with a collection of over 130 explody vehicles to play with, I have a feeling I won't be doing quite so much of that.
Death from Above
The icing on the Mercenaries cake was that game's collection of airstrikes, and Mercs 2 has more where those came from. There were 20 available in the build playable at E3, from old favorites like the Tank Buster and Fuel Air Bomb all the way up to honest-to-god nukes -- which produce a spectacular mushroom cloud, flatten everything in the general vicinity, and even generate aftershocks of a sort; Brown said "cascading damage" continues for half a minute at ground zero.
But though I love a good explosion, I didn't particularly care for how some of the airstrikes are deployed. The game still uses short-range smoke grenades to call in weaponry with a large blast radius, making getaways difficult; and though a new type of strike can lock onto a sticky beacon (which you could ostensibly plant on enemy vehicles) air support has to be called in while your character stands still, and perhaps more frustrating, your character automatically throw beacons and smoke grenades as soon as you select them. Counterintuitive as it might be, you can't just equip the damned thing, run up to an enemy tank and plant it.
Nitpicks aside, Mercs 2 was one of the most satisfying titles I played at E3, and considering how much I enjoyed the original, there's a very good chance I'll be picking up a personal copy of the sequel come its August 31st release.
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July 18th, 2008 at 6:13 pm
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