An Honest Review of Mercenaries: World in Flames by an everyday Hardcore gamer
September 4, 2008, 5:57 PM
This game is pretty bad and not much fun. They’ve somehow, after 3 and ½ YEARS of work, managed to make something that is nowhere near as good as the first one. How you ask? Simple. They did one simple incredibly STUPID thing. It wasn’t the only issue I have with the game, even if it were fixed, the game would still fail to meet the level of its predecessor. The controls are okay, basically the same as what we saw in Mercenaries 1, but the aim is very heavy (meaning that the reticule moves either fast or not at all, making it easy to overcorrect on the aim and finesse very hard). On top of that, there is not one weapon in the game other than the sniper rifle that can hit with any semblance of accuracy if your target is outside 30 feet. Even then, they have an accuracy measure not in inches, or feet, but yards. The most accurate weapon in the game (that isn’t the sniper) throws a spray of bullets out that make Halo 1’s assault rifle look like precision weapon, I mean seriously people, that’s what the BARRELS are for. Unless you have a sniper rifle, forget, just forget, about a headshot (or even a body shot) and any kind of a quick kill. Just hitting them at all is nearly impossible even when close and baddies have about 3 times the health on average that they did before (it differs between faction and solder class) so a nice quick headshot would be a lovely thing to get. The sniper rifle can get a fast kill from a distance, but it also has a reticule the size of a pixel, so getting a headshot is very hard to do in most fights due to afore-mentioned aim. It lacks refire and kill power, and every one of the game’s guns makes you pine for the nice accurate carbine you carried in the first stage of the original game. And the sniper rifle is really the only thing that works to bring down the endless hordes of dim-witted knuckleheads who have more health than they have smarts. You can almost never use it to actually snipe, since all the places have walls or jungle to restrict your view. You can always call in airstrikes, but there’re pricy, AND usually destroy what you need to save, drive, pick up, deliver, you get the idea. Also they usually require you to throw or place a beacon, so you have to be close to your target, which kind of defeats the purpose of the whole figgin’ thing now doesn’t it?

With the chronic lack accuracy, it takes two clips to kill most foes unless you are 10 feet away. Like before, rocket infantry are your biggest threat, but with no real way to kill them quickly from a distance due to the sketchiness of the aim and crap weapons (think getting close to rocket trooper is a good idea?, nope) they tend to wipe you out before you can really kill them. This makes the game harder than it should be, getting in the way of having fun. It’s hard to really get into a mission if your running around trying to get close enough to actually hit someone, then running awy for more health (since you take massive damage having to be close for so long), then rinse and repeat. This means you really have no real options when it comes to tactics, unlike the original game where much of the fun and satisfaction came from. I had much more frustration and boredom than fun in this game, and if I don’t have fun in a game, I don’t play it, no matter how close it comes or what name is on the box. It even removed lots of the small parts of the old game that made somewhat unique or just complete, like stun grenades, stunning and pacifying normal infantry instead of forcing you to kill them, and preset but still realistic car damage just to name a few. Also, health and ammo pickups are always picked up whether you were at full or not, and it is easy to use up an entire missions worth of stuff by accident, especially since at lot of times it is all in one place. For all the difficulty, there is really very little real shooter skill or thinking involved here. The heavy aim, inaccurate weapons, and reduced options see to that.

So there’s my rant. If it were just another open-world game, I’d give it a 6 out of 10 (10 being the best), but as a SECQUEL I give it 2. It fails to even deliver the old formula that we loved, and instead replaces it with a flashy, shallow, and even primitive by comparison shadow of its former self that insults our intelligence and leaves us feeling empty. A classic “next-gen” title. The Next Generation of Gaming. What a massive joke. And these flashy, dumbed-down, broken games are the punch line.