A good while ago, the original Mercenaries game, Playground of Destruction, was released on the original Xbox. With an amazing open world and the fact you could kill or blow up EVERYTHING (often times both), it made for a very entertaining game. Hell, the Mercs 1 trailer alone tells you how great this game is.

For the two of you who don't know, Mercs 1 took place in North Korea around 2009, and just before North and South Korea were about to re-unify into one big Korea, along comes the good General Song, who stages a violent coup and takes control of North Korea. Your job was to kill him and his 51 little bosses, all given nicknames according to a simple deck of cards. (Song, the highest up, was the Ace of Spades, and so on) You pick any of three mercenaries and beat the fuck out of these 52 bosses. Fun times. Really fun times. Some of my favourite game memories come from blowing the shit out of every single building in North Korea. Not only that, but the three mercenaries you could play as were fun and colourful. You had Christopher Jacobs, who was not only tougher to take down then the other two, but he was, how do I say, hilarious? Everything that came his way, he had a joke, and it was delivered in such a cool way it would make those chavs shut their gobs for once. Then you had the ever blood thirsty Mattias Nilsson, the rookie from from Scandianavian country who had two benefits. One, he was much faster then the other two mercs, and two, he had a fauxhawk, which made him look badass. Really badass. Finally, there was Jennifer Mui, who was quite sneaky, and I can't say much more about her because I didn't play her as much as the two guys.

So, Mercs 2 is announced and I think "Holy fuck, what exotic locales can I visit now? What crazy plots and fun characters will pop up?" I followed this game for quite some time, and when the new commercial showed up, I found it followed in the footsteps of the Mercs 1 trailer, because it was fucking awesome.

You've all seen it before, I just thought you needed a refresher. Anyway, everything about it looked fantastic. The graphics were beautiful, it was now taking place in Venezuela, and you can even hire mechanics and the like to help hijack shit. What could go wrong?

A lot.

Mercs 2 is a fun game, don't get me wrong. But it seems like they took the fun of Mercs 1 and kinda limited it. It plays the same, except now the world seems smaller. The AI got stupider, and they actually recorded fewer lines of quick little in-game dialogue for when your mowing them fuckas down. I got sick of constantly hearing Venezuelans yell "Behind da cover" and "FIRE IN DA HOLE", not to mention how blasted stupid they were, and I'm sure you will too. Not to mention the plot (Some asshole Venezuelan doesn't pay you, so you fuck up his shit.) was a recycling of the original Mercs, but without the creative "Deck of 52" twist, the Dead or Alive reward system for the cards, and Mattias' fucking epic faux hawk.

However, with its many many many MANY faults, you'll still find its a really fun game. The gameplay is as solidly awesome as ever, you can still blow up everything, and as hard as you try, you find it hard to hate a game like this.

As for online, I haven't tried it and probably won't for a long time. However, its supposed to be the saving grace of Mercenaries 2. So if you have Xbox Live, you should probably pretend I rated this game a little higher.

89%