I finally finished Mercenaries 2<\/em> this morning.\u00a0 Technically, I finished it last night, but I had one achievement left which I knocked out this morning while riding the exercise bike.\u00a0 Oh yeah, I can snipe vehicle drivers while working out. I am just that good.\u00a0 On second thought, that explains why I haven’t lost any weight.<\/p>\n Any way, Mercenaries 2<\/em> had to be one of the most infuriating games I’ve played in some time.\u00a0 It’s not a bad game, it just requires a tremendous amount of patience to play due to the various bugs.\u00a0 What kind of bugs you say?\u00a0 Well, allow me to explain.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 There is one achievement for verifying all of the HVT’s (kill or capture) and one for capturing all of the HVT’s.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Crap.<\/p>\n Now, there is no way that you can accidentally kill an HVT and have the mission end.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Am I glad that I finally got the achievement?\u00a0 Of course.\u00a0 Was I irritated that I had to go through all of that crap to get something that I had already worked so hard for?\u00a0 You’re damn right I was.<\/p>\n If that had been the only glitch, I would have been OK, but this game is rife with glitches.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Ordering up vehicle deliveries would routinely have the fuel cost deducted from your stockpiles, but no vehicle was delivered.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n Perhaps the biggest glitches in the game come from how incredibly unbalanced it is.\u00a0 In a sandbox game, balance is essential as you’re basically telling the player that they can do whatever they want.\u00a0 In such a situation, you have to make sure that there’s the proper give and take between things.\u00a0 Take, for example, Saints Row 2<\/em>.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Had it been available earlier, it would have made things way too easy.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n In Mercenaries 2<\/em>, 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n In reality?\u00a0 Yeah, not so much.<\/p>\n Through various code glitches and game balancing issues, this tightrope became a ten lane freeway.\u00a0 To beat the metaphor even further, let’s go for a ride.<\/p>\n Mo Money, No Problems<\/strong> Oil, Or Why We’re Here<\/strong> So, how do you keep your stockpiles of fuel topped off while not brazenly stealing from factions that you’re working for?\u00a0 Take this moment to look down at the floor, at those vaguely hand-like appendages on the end of your legs.\u00a0 My people call them feet. That’s how.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 So, to easily get fuel, you 1.) Tag the fuel to be picked up.\u00a0 2.) Pop a smoke grenade signifying that you want to take the fuel.\u00a0 3.) Run like hell.\u00a0 Not very hard.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 So, them seeing you stand around while your pilot takes fuel?\u00a0 Bad.\u00a0 You flying the fuel away yourself as they watch and wave goodbye?\u00a0 Not so bad.<\/p>\n Don’t Be Moody<\/strong> 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.\u00a0 Once they get mad at you, one of the faction members will start radioing in to their boss.\u00a0 At this point, you have about ten seconds to kill the radio operator.\u00a0 If he finishes his message before you take him out, you’ll take a hit on faction mood.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 Again, I’ll explain.\u00a0 Every faction has HVT’s, half of which are usually members of factions you’re already friends with.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 If you’re trying to capture, and not kill, this can be a problem.<\/p>\n So, what you do is get a helicopter.\u00a0 If the HVT is not in the Venezuelan army, get whatever chopper you want.\u00a0 If they’re VZ, get a VZ chopper.\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0 When you get close enough, you’ll see the indicator for the HVT.\u00a0 At this point, he exists, and can be killed.\u00a0 It’s all very quantum.\u00a0 You don’t want him killed, so you back away in your chopper until the indicator disappears.\u00a0 He is now stuffed back in his pocket dimension, protected from harm.\u00a0 At this point, you use all of your ordinance to level the fucking place. I mean, just wipe everything out.\u00a0 Once you’ve done that, you can then switch to your mini gun, move in and start tagging individual soldiers.\u00a0 If they start radioing in, just fly away until they stop.\u00a0 Then come back and kill some more.\u00a0 Does it take time?\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n When blowing up faction targets, the method of preventing a loss of faction mood is even more laughably easy.\u00a0 When you get shot all to hell, you can pause the game and choose the “Medevac” option from the main menu.\u00a0 This will transport you back to your base for a fee of $10,000 and the current contract is canceled.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Sure, the cost is 10,000 bucks, but as you progress through the game you’ll get paid millions<\/em> per target.\u00a0 At that point, is 10,000 dollars really going to make a difference?\u00a0 It’d be like getting pulled over for speeding and having to pay a fine of a nickel.\u00a0 It just doesn’t matter.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 Hardly the high tension rope walk that the game designers intended.\u00a0 The main draw of Mercenaries<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n It seems like it would have been pretty easy to address these balancing issues too, which is the sad part.\u00a0 Maybe make it so that taking the medevac route doesn’t stop radio reports, nor does flying away.\u00a0 If you piss off a faction, doing extra work for them doesn’t net you money and mood points, but just mood points.\u00a0 Consider it working off a debt.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Make it so that you have to get an entirely new bird for them to not notice that it’s you again.\u00a0 Maybe all of these ideas are in the game and just didn’t work right, I don’t know.\u00a0 All I know is that the game ended up being difficult for reasons that seem very far removed from what was originally intended.<\/p>\n If you’re not playing it for achievements and just want to blow things up is it worth it?\u00a0 Yeah, I’d say so, provided you can overlook the bugs.\u00a0 Maybe not for 60 bucks, but certainly for 30.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Unfortunately, I just don’t think that the game is stable, or balanced enough to warrant a 60 dollar purchase.\u00a0 Adding to this, I can’t see myself getting the next one, when inevitably it drops.\u00a0 Fool me once, shame on me, fool me twice, well, in the immortal words of George W. Bush, “we won’t get fooled again.”<\/p>\n
\nAs 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.\u00a0 The fact that he provides the challenge over and over isn’t busted.\u00a0 What appears to be broken is how the maximum bet will cap at 5 million, but the minimum<\/em> 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I should know, because I did.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
\nOil, or fuel, is the other resource to keep an eye on.\u00a0 You can have purchased an entire fleet of attack choppers, but if you don’t have any fuel, they ain’t going no where.\u00a0 Fuel can only be found out in the field, and usually is under the watching eye of a particular faction.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
\nFaction mood is the final “resource” that you have to be aware of.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n