Mercenaries 2: World in Flames review

Mercs 2’s relative ease is due at least in part to miserably stupid AI, but that’s kind of all right for this type of game, where its main purpose is to move the targets in your shooting gallery. What’s not OK are glitchy NPC voices continuously repeating “Enemy sighted!” and “He’s behind that building!” throughout combat.

This and other bugs suck a lot of the joy out of the game. Along with occasional crashes to the desktop, I ran into a nasty reoccurring issue where the AI would completely ignore me unless I got into a vehicle; I had to quit out and restart the game to restore it to working order. There’s also some strange graphical smearing, enemies spawning 100 feet over water where there was once an oil rig, and helicopters slowly spinning head-over-heels in the air. Plus, the menu system is broken - often, clicking on a dialogue option or button won’t work, and you’re forced to use the keyboard. I also hated that I couldn’t turn off auto-aim, which would sometimes lock my mouse on a target when I was trying to shoot something just to the left or right of it (not technically a bug, but still irritating).

Much of what drags Mercs 2 down could be resolved with a patch, and hopefully it will be, because there’s some greatness in there that’s obscured by the locust-like bug swarm. There’s about 20 hours of game here if you try to do all the side missions, and jumping in with a friend and tearing the place apart is itself worth a few more solid hours of entertainment. Luckily, there are no real game-ending bugs, so you can satisfy your appetite for destruction if you’re willing to pay for an unpolished game.

DRM Alert!
SecuROM copy protection requires an Internet connection to activate your installation before you can play, and will only permit you to activate on three computers before you have to phone in and request more installs. (You can reinstall as many times as you like, but only on those three computers.) However, you don’t need the DVD in the drive to play.

PC Gamer scores games on a percentage scale, which is rounded to the closest whole number to determine the GamesRadar score.

PCG Final Verdict: 69% (above average)

Sep 17, 2008