Mercenaries 2: World in Flames Review (PS3)

Mercenaries 2: World in Flames is an action-adventure video game released for the Playstation 3 and developed by Pandemic Studios. The title tells you pretty much everything you need to know. Let's move on.

Story : Same old generic boring mercenary story here. You're a ultra cool guy that does ultra cool things while making ultra cool poses and saying ultra cool one liners. Cliche up the wazoo. There's nothing here that you haven't seen a million times before.

Graphics : The graphics are actually quite good, at least on the main characters. They're all drawn and animated well and have a large variety of actions that all look good. Unfortunately, everything besides the characters is a total mess. There isn't much detail to be had in the backgrounds, and even worse they are loaded in glitches. Graphics pop in and out and the draw distance is a big too small. Honestly, if I listed all the graphical errors in this game it would take far too long. They are not rare occurrences, I promise if you play this game you will see at least twenty of them. Not good.

Sound : The game, sound wise, is actually fairly decent. There's a good selection of music and all of it fits and is ambient when it needs to be. Northing's really catchy here, but the game doesn't really call for catchy tunes. The sound effects are all very good and fit the game well. They're your usual assortment of gun shots and explosions but still, they sound good.

Game play : There's three characters you can select from, and each have a special ability that's as useless as the next. Well, one of them can run fast and that will save you time and after playing it a bit you'll want to complete the game as fast as you can anyway. The controls are good, and they're pretty much everything you've come to expect from the first person shooter game. Nothing really new here, control wise. Nice and sensitive for the most part. There's a few cool mini games here. Everything in the environments can be destroyed. There's also many different ways to play through the game. If you want to be more of a sniper you can, if you want to run in guns blazing and take out everything you can do that too. There is a large variety of weaponry, but almost all of it is useless compared to the few weapons that aren't. The difficulty of this game is very low, and most of the enemies just stand around waiting for you blow them to pieces. Most of them don't even attempt to even look like they're putting up a fight. This is really my main gripe with the game, it's not very interactive because the bad guys are so stupid.

Re playability : The game is just really too plain in every aspect to replay over and over. This game is just the perfect example of a mediocre game taking up space on the game shelf. Pandemic is a good company that makes quality stuff, this game doesn't show it though.

Overall : 4/10. Not a horrible game, but not worth your attention when there's so many great ones out now.