Any way, Mercenaries 2 had to be one of the most infuriating games I’ve played in some time.  It’s not a bad game, it just requires a tremendous amount of patience to play due to the various bugs.  What kind of bugs you say?  Well, allow me to explain.  During the game, you’ll work for various factions and one of the things they’ll want you to do is to verify these High Value Targets or HVT’s.  The way that you verify said target is to either kill them and take their picture, or go and capture them and have the faction who hired you spirit them away in a helicopter.  There is one achievement for verifying all of the HVT’s (kill or capture) and one for capturing all of the HVT’s.  Capturing them all is a tremendous pain in the ass, which we’ll get into later, but seeing how the achievement is 50 points, it’s worth it.  So, last night, I finish up the final mission which ends with me capturing the final HVT, the game’s villain, and as all of the end of game achievements start pouring in, I’m missing the one for capturing all of the HVT’s.  Crap.

Now, there is no way that you can accidentally kill an HVT and have the mission end.  The mission doesn’t end until you photograph the corpse, so there was no way that I could have accidentally killed an HVT as far as the verification count was concerned.  I certainly killed plenty of HVT’s, believe you me, one poor fellow several times actually, but as I never photographed any of them, I knew that it didn’t count.  Also, because I captured the villain at the end instead of killing him, the game also knew that I captured all of them as killing any of the previous HVT’s has your character kill the villain in the end.  The problem was that while the game knew that I had captured them all, it must not have told the achievement system that this was the case.  Luckily, I remembered something a co-worker had told me about the exact same problem, so after signing my profile out, disconnecting the Ethernet cable from the back of the box, signing in, booting the game back up and doing the final mission all over again, the achievement finally popped.  Am I glad that I finally got the achievement?  Of course.  Was I irritated that I had to go through all of that crap to get something that I had already worked so hard for?  You’re damn right I was.

If that had been the only glitch, I would have been OK, but this game is rife with glitches.  Bombing targets show up as being taken out when they haven’t been, or they move to areas of the map that have no targets.  Ordering up vehicle deliveries would routinely have the fuel cost deducted from your stockpiles, but no vehicle was delivered.  Achievements such as “do x thing y number of times” either took much longer, or much shorter than stated to pop, if they popped at all.  The same guy who told me about the trick to getting my glitchy achievement still doesn’t have his achievement for destroying 50 objects with grenades despite having leveled most of Venezuela with nothing but pineapples.

Perhaps the biggest glitches in the game come from how incredibly unbalanced it is.  In a sandbox game, balance is essential as you’re basically telling the player that they can do whatever they want.  In such a situation, you have to make sure that there’s the proper give and take between things.  Take, for example, Saints Row 2.  The best weapon in the game, the Pimp Cane, isn’t available until the end, meaning that you can only use it for the final mission, where it’s pretty much useless.  Had it been available earlier, it would have made things way too easy.  As it was, the Kobra pistols you get were pretty damn powerful, and a smidge unbalancing, however you did have to go out of your way to get them, so it falls into a reward situation.

In Mercenaries 2, you can tell that the intent of the designers was to provide a game where the player is constantly balancing the contrary goals of the various factions, while at the same time, keeping an eye on your two resources: money, used to buy vehicles, supply drops and airstrikes, and fuel, used to deploy said vehicles, supply drops and airstrikes.  In a perfect world, the player would walk a tightrope where they had to be careful about which jobs to take so that they don’t piss off the wrong people while having to complete missions with the limited resources at hand.

In reality?  Yeah, not so much.

Through various code glitches and game balancing issues, this tightrope became a ten lane freeway.  To beat the metaphor even further, let’s go for a ride.

Mo Money, No Problems
As you progress in the game you get paid more and more for your talents however if you’re willing to spend the time, early on you can complete a Winching Challenge provided from your helicopter pilot over and over again to win money.  The fact that he provides the challenge over and over isn’t busted.  What appears to be broken is how the maximum bet will cap at 5 million, but the minimum bet remains a percentage of your total balance, meaning that as long as you never attempted to change the amount of the bet, he’d keep betting you more and more money.  If you didn’t mind doing the same challenge over and over again, you could easily make a billion dollars in a (relatively) short amount of time.  I should know, because I did.  Now, even without doing this, the amount of money you get paid as the contracts increase means that even when properly outfitting yourself, you’ll never go below a hundred million of your current balance.  I got to a billion dollars about a third of the way into the game and never dropped below 900 million, finishing out at around $910 million.

Oil, Or Why We’re Here
Oil, or fuel, is the other resource to keep an eye on.  You can have purchased an entire fleet of attack choppers, but if you don’t have any fuel, they ain’t going no where.  Fuel can only be found out in the field, and usually is under the watching eye of a particular faction.  It also blows up real good, so when it’s not with a faction, and instead is with the Venezuelan army, the game’s only persistent enemy faction, they will usually blow up their oil in trying to get to you.

So, how do you keep your stockpiles of fuel topped off while not brazenly stealing from factions that you’re working for?  Take this moment to look down at the floor, at those vaguely hand-like appendages on the end of your legs.  My people call them feet. That’s how.  Basically, as long as no one in the faction sees you milling about while your chopper pilot comes in to take the fuel they won’t get mad at you, despite the fact that your chopper pilot pilots a very distinctive helicopter, the same helicopter that he regularly uses to transport your ass to the faction that you’re currently stealing from.  So, to easily get fuel, you 1.) Tag the fuel to be picked up.  2.) Pop a smoke grenade signifying that you want to take the fuel.  3.) Run like hell.  Not very hard.  If you still want to go the brazen stealing route, just get in a helicopter of your own and using the winch that comes on every helicopter, even state of the art attack choppers, hover over the fuel, winch it up and fly it away.  Even if the faction knows that it’s you taking the fuel, rather than thinking that it’s one of their own birds, they don’t care.  So, them seeing you stand around while your pilot takes fuel?  Bad.  You flying the fuel away yourself as they watch and wave goodbye?  Not so bad.

Don’t Be Moody
Faction mood is the final “resource” that you have to be aware of.  If a faction is neutral or friendly towards you, you can buy things from them, they won’t shoot you on sight and they will come to extract your HVT’s provided that they’re the ones who want the guy gone in the first place.  Piss off a faction enough so that they become hostile and you either have to kill members of rival factions, blow up some of the angry faction’s targets or bribe them 20% of your bank account to get them back to neutral.

Now, they will get pissed at you for things like killing members of their faction in view of other faction members, blowing up their buildings in view of faction members or if they see you steal fuel as mentioned before.  Once they get mad at you, one of the faction members will start radioing in to their boss.  At this point, you have about ten seconds to kill the radio operator.  If he finishes his message before you take him out, you’ll take a hit on faction mood.

I’m not sure if it was intended to be this way, or if this is a bug, but another way to avoid taking a mood hit is to get out of the area before the radio operator finished his report.  Running usually won’t cut it, however if you’re in a helicopter, you can always fly away quickly enough to cut off the report.  My own thoughts on this is that because this is an open world game, the game doesn’t populate the landscape with people until you get close enough to be able to see them.  If someone is calling in a report, flying away from the site causes the game to shove the people back in to whatever hellish pocket dimension they reside in, and the radio report stops.

Whatever the reason, the ability to make people, and radio reports appear and disappear, pretty much at will, forms the basis of completing the capturing of HVT’s, arguably the activity with the highest risk of pissing off factions.  Again, I’ll explain.  Every faction has HVT’s, half of which are usually members of factions you’re already friends with.  If you run in to a camp guns a blazing, the faction will call in your transgression, you’ll lose mood points with them and may have to end up bribing them.  Not to mention that the soldiers themselves seem to be just as eager to kill the HVT as you are and will regularly shoot you with an RPG even with the HVT right next to you.  If you’re trying to capture, and not kill, this can be a problem.

So, what you do is get a helicopter.  If the HVT is not in the Venezuelan army, get whatever chopper you want.  If they’re VZ, get a VZ chopper.  Fly to the site and get close enough to see the lay of the land, as well as any SAM sites, or tanks or whatever.   When you get close enough, you’ll see the indicator for the HVT.  At this point, he exists, and can be killed.  It’s all very quantum.  You don’t want him killed, so you back away in your chopper until the indicator disappears.  He is now stuffed back in his pocket dimension, protected from harm.  At this point, you use all of your ordinance to level the fucking place. I mean, just wipe everything out.  Once you’ve done that, you can then switch to your mini gun, move in and start tagging individual soldiers.  If they start radioing in, just fly away until they stop.  Then come back and kill some more.  Does it take time?  Well, yeah, but honestly, you have to do about this much work to capture the HVT rather than kill them due to the aforementioned soldier incompetence in the face of HVT bodily harm, so it’s not that big of a deal.

When blowing up faction targets, the method of preventing a loss of faction mood is even more laughably easy.  When you get shot all to hell, you can pause the game and choose the “Medevac” option from the main menu.  This will transport you back to your base for a fee of $10,000 and the current contract is canceled.  What’s also canceled is any radio report of your naughty behaviour. When you blow up a faction target, the contract is considered complete the second that the building is destroyed, usually right when the bomb falls.  The method for blowing up targets becomes: get to the target, blow up the target, medevac out while your friendly faction member calls in your misdeeds.  Sure, the cost is 10,000 bucks, but as you progress through the game you’ll get paid millions per target.  At that point, is 10,000 dollars really going to make a difference?  It’d be like getting pulled over for speeding and having to pay a fine of a nickel.  It just doesn’t matter.

Take all of this together and you have a way of playing the game so that you never run out of money, you only have to work minimally for fuel and everyone loves you.  Hardly the high tension rope walk that the game designers intended.  The main draw of Mercenaries has always been to blow things up but good, so one wonders if the tightrope walk was really that important, but seeing how much work they put into the system, it seems important, even if they made it so deliriously easy to circumvent said system.

Don’t get me wrong, blowing up stuff was fun, and I take great pride in my ability to capture, and not kill, every HVT as some of them were very difficult, even with all of my rigging of the system, but in the end the game was too buggy to love and too unbalanced to take seriously.  I started off playing the game because I wanted to play it and very quickly changed to playing the game to get my full thousand points.

It seems like it would have been pretty easy to address these balancing issues too, which is the sad part.  Maybe make it so that taking the medevac route doesn’t stop radio reports, nor does flying away.  If you piss off a faction, doing extra work for them doesn’t net you money and mood points, but just mood points.  Consider it working off a debt.  If you’re spotted in a chopper doing bad things, don’t make it so that simply flying away makes them forget what you did.  I mean, if a black, slightly damaged chopper just blew up a tank at the base and then flies away, chances are the black, slightly damaged chopper that comes back fifteen seconds later is the same one.  Make it so that you have to get an entirely new bird for them to not notice that it’s you again.  Maybe all of these ideas are in the game and just didn’t work right, I don’t know.  All I know is that the game ended up being difficult for reasons that seem very far removed from what was originally intended.

If you’re not playing it for achievements and just want to blow things up is it worth it?  Yeah, I’d say so, provided you can overlook the bugs.  Maybe not for 60 bucks, but certainly for 30.  Calling in an artillery strike, or dropping a satellite guided surgical strike on a target is a hoot to watch and there is an impressive array of vehicles to get in and tool around with.  Unfortunately, I just don’t think that the game is stable, or balanced enough to warrant a 60 dollar purchase.  Adding to this, I can’t see myself getting the next one, when inevitably it drops.  Fool me once, shame on me, fool me twice, well, in the immortal words of George W. Bush, “we won’t get fooled again.”

Next up for me is Fallout 3.   My achievement guide is prepped and loaded, I have a full list of spiffy weapons to look for and I’ll be taking notes so that once I’m done, I can come back with another mammoth “Final Thoughts” column.  I know I can’t wait.  I can only assume that the suspense is palpable on your end as well.

So, Mercenaries 2 dropped on Sunday, and with it, seamless drop in, drop out cooperative play.  Basically, by default, when you’re playing, any one on your Friends List can just pop on into your game and help you blow stuff up.  On paper, it sounds great but in reality, it’s kind of unsettling.

I was playing on Monday night, just doing my thing, racing to make some money, when there was a message on the top of the screen that one of my friends had joined my game.  I didn’t have my headset on and I was in the middle of a race with cash on the line, so I couldn’t stop to get it.  Instead I just finished my race while he did something or other.  Awkward.

Once the race was finished, I put the headset on and we were good to go, but before that, it was kind of strange. I didn’t ask him to join, and while having him there was lots of fun and very helpful, it’s not like I needed the help either.  Having someone be able to just pop into your game unannounced is somewhat unsettling, even more so to a hermit like myself.  It’s like getting up from the TV to grab some chips, and when you come back,  your neighbor is sitting in your couch.  You may like the guy, but that doesn’t mean you just want him there watching TV with you.

At the same time though, these people are on your Friends List for a reason, so why not have them just drop by and help you blow up buildings?  After all, the purpose of Live is for you to be able to play with others, and here’s a game that makes it as simple and unobtrusive as possible.  Shouldn’t this be a good thing.  Yeah, I guess, but when you’re like me, and the notion of picking up a phone and talking to someone is enough of a break in your solitary routine to cloud your entire day, having you appear unannounced in an attack chopper is enough to cause fits.

Yeah, I can change the setting so that only I can invite you, or that no one can ever join, but in doing that, I feel like I’d be dismissing all of the hard work done to make such a great system.  Plus, I probably should play more with others as a complete withdrawal from human contact isn’t good for anyone, especially someone who shares a house with three other humans.  So for now, I’ll leave the settings at the default, which means that when I’m tearing up Venezuela, others can pop in and help with the destruction.  Just, if you plan on joining, knock first.  And bring chips.