June 25, 2009

Note to game designers: If your characters are going to throw out witty sound bites, you best record a metric ton of them.

I never played or had any need to play the original Mercenaries. It didn’t seem like a game I would enjoy at all. Mercenaries 2 was originally skipped for similar reasons, as well as due to their completely scary-ass box art. I don’t want to play as that guy. I don’t even want to have anything to do with that guy. It was never on my radar.

But Crackdown had weakened me to the whole open-world concept… and then I went and enjoyed Far Cry 2 so much, once I got it figured out…
So I was weak, and when I saw the game new for $10 in the Toys R Us clearance rack, well, I couldn’t pass it up. Especially since I had been jonsing to try Red Faction: Guerrilla. Here was a cheap replacement I could play until that game dropped in price! Perfect.

I fear, though, that Crackdown has really kind of ruined me on Open World games.
Crackdown was brilliant for many reasons, but one of the things that I don’t think is immediately apparent is that it didn’t have “missions.” Sure, you had a list of people to kill, and you had to eventually go kill them. But there was no “start” and “stop.” You just went for them if you wanted, or you didn’t. The game didn’t load an instance to give you a very guided experience that goes against what an open-world game actually does, you know? This is why I didn’t like Bully, and Mercenaries 2 is no different. There are all these missions (well, they’re called “contracts”) that you take on and have to do. What’s worse, the game doesn’t really penalize you for dying in the missions, letting you just retry them, but if you die outside of a mission, it costs you money and you lose all of your guns and are left with just a pistol. It is actively de-incentivizing you to explore, and instead to just take your helicopter to the next mission point and do the next mission. So you’re pretty well stuck in these missions, and the open world is just some pain in the ass to travel through to get to more missions. Sure, there are things to find in the world (such as large pallets of money that people are keeping in the middle of fields for no sane reason) and little tiny sidequests to take on (the factions point out “High Value Targets” you can capture and buildings you can raze for additional cash) but when you’re risking having to go through the pain of getting yourself re-equipped if you fail, it just doesn’t seem worth doing half the time.

Still, the gameplay itself is not bad. You can pick from three different Mercenaries, not just the one on the cover (although he has arguably the best perk associated with him: quicker regenning health) and then you run around, building your PMC and managing your relationships with these factions in order to get to the final boss and murder him for shooting you in the rear. The gunplay originally feels a little weird (the guns aren’t super-accurate, besides the sniper rifle, and it seems to take multiple shots to take someone down and you can never get ammo for it outside of buying it and air-dropping it to yourself) but I found myself quickly getting used to the fact that it’s nowhere near one shot, one kill, and that you just have to spray enemies for a little while to take them down. This does give you a really go reason to rush in and use Melee a lot, which is a one-hit-kill. (I think it knocks them out, actually, but same difference. I also think my Melee skills were improved by picking the girl Merc, who has a faster run speed so I could rush machine gun turmulents and whatnot and melee the gunners easier) You can buy and helicopter in vehicles and weapons and whatnot, but I really don’t know why you’d want to. It doesn’t really feel good to do so. Air-dropping in a box of ammo doesn’t feel more badass than murdering someone and taking their ammo, so I don’t know why I would, and I have yet to find a specialized weapon so good that I wouldn’t just use the rifles most of the generic enemies drop. There’s also no real reason not to just steal cars as they drive by if you need a vehicle, so I’ve never found a good reason to air-drop transports, either. I don’t know. For being what I assume was the core mechanic to make this game feel different, it doesn’t actually feel very useful. The only thing I really use is calling in the Helicopter for quick transport to other places on the map. There were, however, some missions where I would get free “call in the troops” air-drops, where I could call in helicopters that would drop in 3 grunts to fight for me? That felt pretty awesome, and was a great way to divert fire from me. I think I can buy those, too. Maybe I should be buying a bunch of those and using them more often.

The one thing that I actually really like about the game is that it makes no pretense that you’re not a bad person. There are pickups all over the map, as I said, but they aren’t normal video game collectibles, where it’s okay to take them because they are there just for you. You walk up to a fuel tank, and it says “Steal Fuel.” And you steal it. If the owners are around, they shoot at you. It’s a little touch, but I rather liked that. You just take it. If you’re taking a faction’s stuff, and they get pissed at you, well, just donate money to their war fund until they can’t ignore you any more. You do what you want. You are a very bad person, and not for some noble goal. You just are. I dunno, it’s refreshing not to have some bullshit explanation for every damn thing, and just let it be what it is.

But yeah, I don’t know. Mercenaries 2 is not a perfect game. If I had paid $60 bucks for it, I would probably have been displeased. But the basic elements that make open world games great are hiding in there, and it can be a pretty fun time, if you let it be. It is sure as fuck worth the $10 bucks I’ve paid for it, and after the like… two days straight of playing it, I’m pretty sure I’ve gotten my money’s worth.

Leave a comment