Mercs 2

I’ve been looking forward to the Mercenaries 2 demo on XBL for a few weeks now, and it finally arrived! I quickly downloaded it and fired it up (pun intended), only to be… well… disappointed. For a few reasons. The first being that I couldn’t easily tell what the heck I was supposed to do.

I was plopped down in front of a base, eventually figured out I had to land a helicopter on top of a building, and then… nothing. Nothing happened. I get out of the helicopter and a baddy immediately spawns out of nowhere and flies it away. I like to think of myself as someone who can usually figure things like this out, but… no dice.

Maybe it’s because I’ve never played Mercs 1, or maybe I wasn’t paying good enough attention to what the objective was. Regardless, I’m disappointed. Possibly in myself; I can’t decide if it was me or the game who is broken, so it’s hard to direct my disappointment.

I still plan on gamefly-ing it, if I can get my hands on a copy before October’s slew of awesome releases (Fallout 3, Fable, Gears 2… well that’s in November, the new Castlevania DS), at which point I will be so distracted that I will probably never come back to Mercs 2. Gamefly is a long shot, tho, as 95% of the time they are out of whatever game it is I want to play. Sometimes I question the validity of their service, but I suppose that playing a game 6 months late is better than not playing it at all. Plus, I get to play tons of games that I KNOW I would never consider purchasing, if for no other reason than to dissect them from a design perspective. And I suppose Mercs 2 falls under that umbrella.

~Savid