The things you do for money…

The original Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction was a GTA clone released back when open-world games could still be called GTA clones, which means that it had very little to do with GTA. You played the role of the eponymous mercenary sent to a war-torn North Korea to blow shit up and make money. Actually, you were there to “apprehend” (yeah, right…) 52 high-ranking officers of some North Korean faction, but you did it by blowing shit up and it rewarded you with money, so whatever. It was a very good game, if a bit rough around the edges, and I had unspeakable amounts of fun with it.

So did a lot of people, I guess, because a sequel was made for the then-next-gen XBox 360 and PS3: Mercenaries 2: World in Flames. So, how good is Mercenaries 2?

Mercenaries 2 is a buggy, unfinished piece of shit.

Mercenaries 2 is my favourite game of all times.

And I earnestly mean both of those statements; Mercenaries 2: World in Flames is both a barely playable mess and the best anything ever; it’s unbalanced, buggy and really weird (and also buggy), but it’s a metric fuckton of fun!

How buggy is it? Let me count the ways…

When you first reach a new area, your sidekick/handler/annoying tutorial lady will tell a bit about it over your earpiece, like which faction is controlling it or what the best place to grab a burger at 3 in the morning is. In itself, it wouldn’t be a problem, except for the fact that the game doesn’t remember where you have and haven’t been and replays the same clips over and over again every time you go through them. Even worse, one such area is directly in front of your home base, which is where you start after loading the game, where you spawn after dying, where you’re transported if you get stuck somewhere (and you will get stuck…), where a lot of missions end and start…

What I’m trying to convey is that you’ll hear this particular area’s message a lot.

When you die or fail a mission, the world very often fails to reset properly, which means that retrying a mission will very often involve doing it again with the same reinforcements that were called on your previous attempt still there, waiting for you, or with the alarm tower that you had previously destroyed not having been replaced since.

AI soldiers have zero problems with lobbing a grenade or shooting an RPG an inch away from their face, a quirk that doesn’t mesh well with the game’s main mechanic, which is that the targets that you’re supposed to apprehend are worth twice as much money alive than dead, which means that you have to punch them across the face, drag their body to a safe, flat surface, call a chopper and load the body without their friends blowing them (and you) up.

AI soldiers just generally have very little instinct of self-preservation. Friendly troops will routinely walk off ledges and die, sometimes right after being dropped off on a 10 feet high helipad, or jump into water, where they will not die instantly, but rather swim leisurely for a few seconds, unable to shoot, then go limp and float away. Helicopter pilots will regularly land on various slopes (including, but not limited to: cliffsides, house roofs and large vehicles… ironically, 25% of the time, they’ll refuse to land on even ground) and tip to the side, roll over and blow up.

If you gather some of the collectibles, quit the game and return, they will sort of spawn again, but not quite, and merely driving or flying close by will make the game believe that you picked up a new one and allowing you to collect all of them effortlessly, extremely early in the game. It will also allow you to collect more than there is supposed to be, to no effect (as far as I know).

The game allows you to bet money on some mini-games accessible in your home base. If you do the helicopter winch challenge a couple of times (and only this challenge, which, fortunately, is the easiest and fastest of the bunch), the minimum bet will increase over the maximum $5 million bet, and will eventually allow you to make hundreds of millions in a few minutes. If making money is still too hard or too slow, you can stack some things in the mini-game area while you’re just roaming around, and those objects will remain there during the winch challenge, allowing you to simply pick up the case and drop it at the required height (which is the point of the game, I should have mentioned that…) in seconds.

Clicking the right stick will make your character use his or her gun’s iron sights, which makes your screen zoom in a little and your character aim a little less accurately.

Yes. Less.

On the XBox 360, achievements will unlock randomly without you having to do anything, or fail to unlock when you meet all the requirements for them.

Sometimes soldiers will fall out of the sky. I believe this has been fixed, eventually.

Once you’ve hired a helicopter pilot, you can tag supplies found in the wild (money, fuel and ordnance) for him to come and pick up. Normally, if the helicopter is damaged too badly, the supplies are lost and you have to pay for the chopper repairs, but if you go far enough away from the pick up location while the chopper is on its way, it gets collected instantly.

Then there’s the boring fact that every other co-op session that I play ends in my XBox locking up.

Mercenaries 2 also has very uneven difficulty. On one hand, it’s almost impossible to die (your character’s health recharges extremely fast, being inside of an exploding vehicle will not damage you at all, damage that would normally kill you will instead bring you to 1 health point, vehicle hijacking QTEs make you invulnerable…), but the main mechanic of the game, capturing live, high-value targets, can sometimes be next to impossible, mostly thanks to the previously mentioned brain-dead AI. If the target himself won’t walk down a cliff, he’ll be run over or blown up before you can even get within smack-in-the-face range, shot in the back while you’re carrying him, or blown out of the sky while your helicopter carries him away.

All by his own troops, by the way.

Finally, let’s not forget that the game is extremely short. Completing the story missions (and nothing else) will take you about 4 hours.

So why do I love this game so much? Partly because it’s funny; it’s bad in the same way that movies like The Room or Troll 2 are bad. For example, one mission in the game asks you to rescue a captured friendly pilot from atop a skyscraper. Normally, you’d have to approach it on the ground, destroy the anti-air, get a helicopter and swoop in for the rescue. When I did the mission, however, I had hijacked an enemy chopper and, being disguised as an enemy, didn’t notice the missile trucks on the ground. Letting the pilot in, however, broke my disguise, and I was promptly blown out of the sky, along with my new friend. On my second attempt, I closed in on the ground and started working on those missile trucks when the pilot to be rescued remembered me from my previous failure and tried to join me, plummeting to his death.

This is an easily replicable bug that would definitely have been caught, had the game had an actual development cycle, and should be frustrating. It would be, if it weren’t so fucking hilarious.

But the main reason why I love this game so much is that it’s a great sandbox. The term gets thrown around a lot when talking about open world games, but I usually find those games limited in either the tools that they offer you or the ways that they let you use these tools.

The 3D Grand Theft Auto games are a good way to illustrate what I mean. The older GTA3 had a very open mission structure, in the sense that there were very few hard limitations on how you could complete the game’s objectives, but the player was held back by the options available to him. The game would ask you to kill some guy and let you do whatever you want to accomplish this, but you would only have access to cars and guns, and kind of a plane but not really, and not much else. On the other hand, the more recent GTA4 and 5 have a lot more tools offered to you, what with the cars and bikes and trucks and boats and planes and helicopters and remote bombs and AI friends and parachutes and all that, but will not let you use them for the sake of their narrative. The game will give you access to all of these things at certain points, but as soon as a mission starts, will prevent you from using any of them except the ones that you’re supposed to.

Mercenaries 2: World in Flames achieves both. The game is almost completely free of form, only having a handful of actual missions, its gameplay instead relying on the very basic idea of having to apprehend/kill specific enemies. The placement of each is varied enough that you have the opportunity to use all the tools in your arsenal (disguises, helicopters, long-range weapons, airstrikes, boats, civilian cars, melee, reinforcements, tanks, etc.) while also allowing you myriad approaches to each task, all of them valid. Of course, you can roll into an enemy camp in a tank and just flatten everything, but you can also go around the back in a boat, or sneak in while you’re disguised, or snipe from a nearby hill, or, hell, use a helicopter’s winch to lift an entire fuel tank and drop it on your target from 10 000 feet.

By the way, you can also do the same thing with a boat instead of a fuel tank. A boat that your co-op partner is driving. And from which he will emerge, unscathed, afterward.

This game is so fucking awesome…