I'm not mad, I'm just disappointed.

So, recently, a pretty awesome game was released by the name of Mercenaries 2. It's your standard open-world shooter. That is to say, it's third-person, it looks pretty okay and it contains lots of boring a-to-b. On the wholly positive side of things, I found that the story is, as far as I've played it, well written and engaging, with the motives of everyone you meet clearly defined either through exposition or clearly defined faction relationships. The weapon system is realistic in that you can't carry everything... Just 2 weapons and two types of explosive.

Also present is a range of supporting characters who, despite how easy it could have been, do not fit the stereotypes that you might assign to them on your first encounter.

Other than that, it's actually a pretty crap game.

First, I want to address the controls. FPS games have been around for 35 years, with the modern FPS being born with Quake (1996), 12 years ago. Dual-Stick Shooter controls have been under development since the PlayStation, finally being basically perfected with the release of Halo, which had Dual-Stick control with each stick controlling a certain function of the player's body, which is to say one for movement and one for aiming. They even have (and this is the important part) assisted aiming. That's right. Aiming on consoles is a chore, and can be made much easier. So, why is it so hard in Mercenaries 2? Why is my aiming not assisted? Today, the average consumer can rightly expect to have assisted aiming on par with Halo. It's not hard, after all. It's not hard to infer if what they're aiming at is what they want to aim at, and adjust aiming speed appropriately.

Another peeve is geometry. Unless it should look like two different things, it shouldn't. If you travel along any road in this game and just look at the edges, you'll see that the road network is a separate set of geometry to the world. In this 'next gen' era, why is it that we have to see this? It's because people are still hooked on using efficient-but-ugly terrain systems, like Magic Carpet (1994). Games such as Burnout Paradise prove that you can have modeled terrain and still run at a perversely smooth 60 fps. Sure, Burnout Paradise is a racing game and you can make a lot of savings under that genre, but then you have to look at games like GTA IV, which while making a sacrifice of FPS can have a shooter in a modeled terrain world.

However, we can't visit geometry without taking a look at something very close to it; Texturing. I don't have a video capture card, so I can't really show you, but there are some terrible artifacts on quite a few textures. Luckily, it's not too noticeable.

So, I have a final gripe. The game mechanics remind me of Army of Two, another EA game that just doesn't really play well despite the fact that it was well designed. If you pull iron sights, you also automatically crouch and even slide if you were running, too, which is annoying because thus far it seems as though while sliding, you can't shoot. Not a problem if I was sliding into cover, but this happens out in the open too, where I'm probably getting shot to hell and back.

For all it's faults, I can't really say that I would advise people not to play the game, just that if they do want to buy the game, they need to understand that these faults exist and can detract from your experience. I just hope that someone, somewhere, reads this post and realizes that mediocrity is really starting to get on my tits.