Ah Mercenaries 2. Following the awesome that was Mercenaries 1 back on the PS2, I was waiting patiently (and sometimes not) for mercs 2 to come out. Grabbed it on its day of release for my Xbox 360 and started playing. After crunching a couple days at it, I realized, it was entertaining, but not the awesome I was hoping for, and its game wrenching, game stopping bugs at times can be a real downer.
The Good:
You can blow stuff up. Indeed, even after a few days I still have moments of...."you know what, I'm going to burn an expensive air strike just to see this thing go kablooie". Things explode impressively, and there's a giddy sense of thrill when you drop a carpet bomb run on a base (enemy or otherwise).
I kinda liked the voices. I couldn't tell directly, but it sounded like Nathan Fillion and Adam Baldwin (ala Firefly) were contributing to the soldier-type NPC chatter.
Grenades and weapons that go boom (including c4) are awesome.
The "Meh"
The storyline. It actually comes across as more linear than expected. Sure its sorta an open ended world, but it takes a GTA sorta approach to map management, where until you get to a certain point in the story you can't get to certain zones without near insta-death.
The Deck of 52 has been replaced sorta by faction specific missions and bounties. They're all roughly the same format, just usually aimed at that faction's particular foes. Problem is, unless you're taking a 'clear a faction all the way through' before trying to open up the other faction's missions, it can be needlessly cluttered on your map. You have to sorta 'hand select' each bounty marker on your map to see which faction its for, rather than say it being neatly coded with a faction flag visual.
Also, somehow your targets, if you're doing a 'capture/kill HVT (High Value Target)' mission automatically know you're hunting them, even if they're your allies. So if you wander into a friendly base, if you get in range your mini-map automatically pings the location of the potential target, and if you walk too close, guess what, the target goes hostile and so does the whole base. Near the end I was finding it more useful to just kill the bounties and take their pictures rather than try and subdue/capture them.
Weapons: Explosions are fun. Once you pick up a Fuel-Air RPG things get awesome, but otherwise, something I noticed was that there wasn't really an incentive to change weapons. My guy started with a carbine, probably some m4 variant. And basically until near the 2/3rds point in the game, I kept that as my primary gun until finally something better came along. Why the carbine? Cause it was the most accurate. Sure things like the light MG had more ammo, and theoretically more stopping power, but the thing was so inaccurate, it wasn't worth it. For the most part in the first 2/3rds of the game, foes generally cart around AK47s or light MGs, if they're not using sniper rifles or RPGs. In this, Mercs 2 is kinda like Mercs 1, where I also mostly ran around with the carbine as the primary weapon until the prototype rifle opened up.
Weapons2: In general, guns felt weak. The really decent stuff with the good audio and visuals and 'heft' were all vehicle mounted. I got great joy with vehicles that seemed to fire incendiary rounds from their autocannon/machinegun. My secondary weapon choice was typically an RPG (and definitely the fuel-air RPG once it opened up) or a grenade launcher. Sometimes I'd swap the rpg/grenade for a sniper rifle. But its still safe to say that for the first 2/3rds of the game, I essentially used the same 2 or 3 weapons.
Vehicles: In many ways vehicles are MUCH better than they were in Mercs 1. Though I think thats a function of the relative ease in slapping on a decent driving model to most games nowadays. Most vehicles are kinda ridiculously fragile though, including stuff like tanks, which strikes me as odd. I use helicopters alot.
The Annoying
Voice acting was good, but the general chatter script between you and your controller/operator got pretty annoying. Basically as you flew around or whatever, doing missions, she'd chime in on your location, or give you a tip. Useful the first time you hear it. Then when you hear it for the 15th time crossing the same zone, its annoying. Especially annoying is her tendency to chime in every 5-10 minutes with "If you're ever stuck, come back to the HQ and talk to me", the same dialog every time. It seems to me they could have spent a bit more time coming up with random dialog that essentially said the same thing, just so there'd be some variation to the radio chatter you hear.
Purchasing and equipping stuff. You unlock shop items in various factions to add to your stockpile. Cept you can actually only equip stuff by first calling in a helicopter drop for the gear you've bought. I've got 15 crates of Fuel Air Rpgs or Carbines, or whatever, and I can't get one without calling in an air drop. An option to equip yourself with less hassle when at your HQ would have been welcome.
The Really Lame
Game freezes. Requiring full console reboot.
Certain kinds of lock ups that prevent you from using 'zoom' functions on your binocs or your scoped weapons. Not requiring a reboot, but requiring a reload of save. Which can be quite a ways off if it happens mid-mission. Since saves are more 'checkpoint' as opposed to 'quicksave' usually you have to run a mission through entirely or restart from the beginning.
Also, without giving away too much. Those familiar with the previews of the game know that the previews talked about the awesomeness of one particular airstrike. But what they didn't note, probably cause the reviewers didn't know either' was this awesome airstrike isn't available during the normal game. Its accessible through obtaining all 100 of the secret items in the game map, but even then isn't unlocked until after the game is done, and you're in sandbox mode. Its like the GTA "Oh, you mean I can get unlimited ammo AFTER THE GAME IS DONE?" kinda thing. So its incredibly lame.
Sure there are other cool airstrikes, but the fact that they carted this one out for the game previews, but then not for the actual game, is bad juju.
Oh, and related to those 100 secret items. A funny thing happens when combined with the above mentioned freeze and required reboot. It seems that the world resets in a way too. So if I've picked up say 30 something of the secret items already, and later my game freezes and I reboot, what I've found is that now if I fly/move over that location where that secret item I already picked up USED to be, I get credit for it again. So at current total, I am 131 out of 100 secret items. Which is just frelled up.
All in all, its an entertaining game. I'd give it a 6/10. Its like Dynasty Warriors. You know what you're getting into when you buy Dynasty Warriors <Insert whatever next number here>. Flying around and blowing stuff up is fun. Fun enough to make up for the big problems. But in all, I'm kinda wishing I didn't blow that 50 dollar Best Buy gift card paying for part of this, instead waiting a bit more for another game to come out. This woulda made a better game-rental than purchase. I probably won't sell it back to get used-game credit at my game store, but I kinda wished I waited to read reviews (and waited a few weeks post release) rather than buying it the day it came out.