Essentially this was supposed to enlarge upon Pandemic Studios' first offering Mercenaries, but it falls short in comparison in implementation. By 3 hours in, you have seen every type of mission avaiable and the rest of the game is the generic archtypes.
Mercenaries 2 has all the potential to be a blockbuster game. The original was a solid, imaginative outing, a few memorable characters, and great mission structure for an open world game. Unfortunately Merc2 threw away some of the best things that made the first game memorable and tried to reinvent the wheel when they didn't have too. While factions remained the same as from Merc1, Merc2 lacks the definitive card system that made killing bosses in Merc1 fun. Instead of collecting "cards" like in a deck of cards for killing minor bosses, Mercs2 tries to impose a nonsensical story over the game. In particular, the final boss battle was not only anti-climatic, but generally a slog to get to checkpoint to check point.
Perhaps the worst feature of the new Merc2 game is when trying to hijack a vehicle, you get stuck into a canned animation/button pressing mini-game. By the 10th time, you would rather just blow the vehicle up with an RPG instead of doing the same animation again and again. Furthermore, about halfway through the game when the enemy realizes that they have guns, you take damage while going through the mini-game, and if you press any button wrong on execution almost guarantees insta-death. The best upside to the vehicle is that you can recover from damage while inside the vehicle, as long as it isn't destroyed with you in it.
The plot elements of Merc2 are so threadbare that the less is said is better. The idea of a three way faction tug of war seems like it should work on paper, but in implementation every action that you take loses any significance after you realize that you could go through 1/3 of the game killing only one faction, yet get mysteriously pardoned pulling a few jobs on that faction's enemies. Going either the American/Chinese way makes little difference as the weapons work exactly the same and merely have been re-skinned. There's no real difference from the Abrams tank from the Allies to the T-80 from the Chinese. Supposedly the money is supposed to give you a further incentive to complete some missions, but it's hard to care about some arbitrary number that goes down dramatically if you call in an air strike that is much more powerful and fun. Even worse, you have to do make work missions for the first two factions in the game before the Allies and Chinese even become available. The earlier factions essentially disappear from the story lines as the game moves on, chucking these past allies to the side with no more mind then litter on a highway. Expect the usual assortment of junk assignments from all sides here as well such as package, escort, survival, etc. that get stuffed in to make the game seem "bigger" or "longer". Expect to learn to hate races as you get blindsided and potshotted arbitrarily from random enemy spawns on the map.
Graphically the game looks dated on the 360. Texture work is shoddy, the people you kill quickly become faceless generic copies of each other, and even high value targets do little to make themselves feel different from each other. Arguably the best vehicles in the game, the helicopters, are deliberately seem to be lacking in detail, and the scenery quickly becomes muddied/hazed as altitude is gained. The smoke and fire effects are standard, while the water effects feel dated in comparison to other engines/implementations that were contemporaries such as Bioshock. Mercs2 definitely does not showcase the abilities of ANY platform.
Though it does have its negative points, otherwise it is a solid B-category style shooter that is still fun to run people over with a tank.
Unfortunately Pandemic Studios, the creator of the game has been closed and the community tools are now unavailable. EA has shuttered the doors on this studio and property for now.
