Mercenaries 2(click on picture to play) is an action/sidescroller made by Armor games and published by EA as a promotion for their XBox game Mercenaries 2: World in flames. While its pretty good for a side-scroller, it has some major flaws. For one, this game looks just like another metal slug clone with some new sprites thrown in. The background does look better drawn than metal slug games but the game-play is the same.

Some people over at Newgrounds have unfairly compared it to the real Mercenaries 2 game and by that have deemed it unworthy. While that is not fair as this game is a flash game and the real Mercenaries 2 is a huge title from Electonic arts, I would have expected better than this from Armorgames and EA. They could have at least varied the game-play at little more and added more interaction with the environment. Most flash gamers(myself included) thought the game-play was repetitive and monotonous after a while and lost interest.

The other huge complaint I have about this game is the large amount of CPU resources you need to run the game. I have never had trouble with a flash game before(besides endgame TD’s where there are a million objects on the screen) but this game lagged on all but the lowest setting. The first time I tried to play it on my dual-core computer with 2GB ram, it took forever to just get past the menu and set the settings down to low. Even at low, it chugged along at times. Since flash gamers are generally casual gamers, I’d say they did a poor job in balancing show-off graphical display(which wasn’t that great) and game-play. On anything but a high-end computer, I would recommend you turn the settings down to low to get a playable frame-rate. The game is also pretty short which is to be expected since its basically a trailer for an EA title but they could have thrown a little more into it than they did.

In the final analysis, this game would have passed if it was an amateur metal-slug game but since it was developed and published by a combination of EA and Armorgames, it was a bit of a disappointment. The length of the game, lack of creativity, and the fact that this game only had the most basic side-scrolling elements are big letdowns of what could have been a great flash game. If you’ve never played a flash side-scroller, take some time to play this game. If you’ve played metal-slug series, skip it, unless you really want to play more of the same.

Tags: mercenaries, shooting

This entry was posted on Friday, August 29th, 2008 at 8:42 pm and is filed under Action games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.