Mercenaries 2 is not the first UK #1 game of 2008 to centre on privatised military acting in the global south. Coming after Army of Two, it is not even the first one to be published by EA, which points to quite the level of saturation as well as EA’s rather scattergun approach to acquisitions including developers Pandemic Studios. The attraction of the concept at large, perhaps, was in pursuing much of the action of the military shooter without so many of its constraints. In particular, the focus on money could work as both a way of rolling out upgrades and as a way of keeping score.
For all that it does involve plenty of gun battles, Mercenaries 2 is less mechanically inspired by military shooters of any stripe, and more by the same Grand Theft Auto games as the first Mercenaries. Your main character helps stage a coup in Venezuela only to get betrayed by the new president, shot in the bum, and not even paid. From there it’s open world and open season as you play off international oil companies, local rebels, and anyone else around, taking jobs and working your way up to payback. With an emphasis on the double meaning of payback which the game is keen to explore, with its cash- and violence-based menu design elements and slogan of “everybody pays”.
This is not the game to come to for a startling new take on the genre’s gameplay. It sometimes feels like the game’s location includes a city just so that you can have the reassuringly familiar experience of stopping traffic to steal a random stranger’s car with a press of the Y button. The game doesn’t go out of its way to tell you that’s a possibility, but I felt with the deep certainty of muscle memory that it would be. Health and ammo power-ups, generally in destructible crates, are provided in the most straight-forward old-school fashion.
Mercenaries 2 was delayed several times and its conservatism and lack of polish leaves it with rather the feel of a launch game, a short and simple PS2 Grand Theft Auto barely updated for HD. It has just a few moments of doing something slightly different; in some of the more effective large scale battles with different vehicles you can see Pandemic’s background making Star Wars Battlefront. Likewise the attempt to have multiple different factions at play, although the implementation of being able to disguise yourself as each one is thin at best.
Where the gameplay doesn’t stand out, the style with which it is presented does. The original Mercenaries was not a realistic game and gave outsized personalities to its three possible leads. They all return, although only the white man makes it to the cover this time, and their characters are even more central and given more autonomy among more ridiculous surrounds. I played as Jennifer Mui, who is posh and British, and whose role is as a sort of original model Lara Croft with a super-inflated ego. The game’s dire need of more voice clips become apparent after just a few minutes of hearing the same “it’s never shoes” with every opened crate. On the other hand her quips and interactions with her remote assistant are a lot more fun than anything in Army of Two.
Mercenaries 2 puts its concept of fun above a lot, and much of that concept is in blowing stuff up. There are a lot of explosions, often for no good reason. Before the tutorials are finished, you have been introduced to the concept of tanks being airdropped in for you, and being able to call in air strikes. When you break into a villa to make it your centre of operations, there is a tank inside there, too, self-evidently just to have the chance to hijack it via quick time event, and blow up more stuff, but indoors. When the game invites you to do some additional shooting trials, one of them involves a kind of clay pigeon shoot with cars flying through the air as the target. It is a reliably, inventively ridiculous game.
The lack of seriousness runs through the story in a similar manner to the previous Grand Theft Autos it takes after. This means an early mission where you are sent to retrieve “The Devastator” and it turns out to be a pink bike with a basket on the front (“don’t rip the little tassels off”). It means acquiring new team-mates who are the broadest of stereotypes. It also means American agents hoping to get you to help them to “secure the oi… the peace”. It means lampshading the careless treatment of a real country as your playground of destruction. Which is better than not doing so, I guess, and better than glorification. The thing is just that when the tepid nihilist satire is published by the same company as said glorification, it’s hard to be too cheered.
Top of the charts for week ending 6 September 2008:
Top of the charts for week ending 13 September 2008:
