When Mercenaries 2 launched on August 18th it garnered mixed reviews, at best. The majority of them called it anywhere from average to a massive disappointment. In fact, many of you in the community bemoaned the game. I can still recall the many blogs I read that ripped the game apart and warned people to stay far, far away from it. All this talk of how horrible the game turned out to be and the sheer malcontent for it concerned me. What happened to the series that I had learned to love after playing the first game? How could the developers be so careless with the sequel to one of the better games of the previous generation? I rented the game to see whether everything I heard was correct and if it would make me, too, want to post an all-caps rant on how horrible it is.

A couple weeks back, I went to the local Blockbuster (I know, I know, I hate it too.) looking for a copy of Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. There wasn’t a copy in stock and after going through a number of other games that weren’t in stock, despite being displayed as such, I settled on Mercenaries 2. I got home and casually popped it into the disk tray of my 360. I wasn’t expecting much as it booted up. The all-caps rants and bad reviews flashed once more before my eyes, lowering my expectations further. However, I was met by something a far cry from the things I had heard about the game. I was met by a highly entertaining and enjoyable game.

I had played the demo, which wasn’t much fun at all, yet I was now having a blast. What had changed? For starters, my overall knowledge of the game had expanded. I wasn’t simply dropped into a mission and given a new interface to figure out how to use, a massive fault in the demo. However, the biggest change was that there was a motive behind my actions. My motive was to get bigger and better explosives and vehicles as I progressed through faction jobs. This is where Pandemic really got it right. There is always something leading you just a tiny step further into the game. I really felt like I was working towards something that was not only integral to the gameplay, but also something that offered me a new experience. Not to mention that the graphics were nice, I enjoyed the action-oriented gameplay and, most importantly, it was just plain fun.

The fun I was having overshadowed the gripes I had with the inability to call in airstrikes whilst in a vehicle and the often repetitive enemy dialogue. Issues that cropped up always became an afterthought as I dropped more bombs and caused more beautiful havoc. I also felt there was something to consistently look forward to, be it blowing up one of the oil rigs spread throughout the map, or the acquisition of the nuclear bunker buster, which creates one of the coolest explosions in a video game to date. This technique of giving the player a constant goal to not only work for, but look forward to, kept me coming back for more.
However, the game is not without its issues that had a hand in turning many players away. Pandemic seems to have missed the forest for the trees in many cases, as they focused more on the small, less apparent aspects of the game and missed the larger aspects that make up the game like AI and ridding the glitches that occur all too often. I love it when developers put small, seldom noticed, touches with a game, but not at the expense of the game as a whole.

However, when it comes down to it, I found Mercenaries 2 to be highly entertaining, despite its quarks and the issues that so many had with it. The mixture of good ol’ fashioned fun and making sure the player always has something to look forward to, take it far and beyond what I had heard about the game before I picked it up by chance. I urge you to give Mercenaries 2 a rental and try it for yourself. Look past some of the issues while focusing on just having fun, and you may just find yourself enjoying the game more for what it is, instead of what it isn’t.