GDC 07: Mercenaries 2: World in Flames Impressions

Electronic Arts showed off a number of its upcoming games at a pre-GDC event last night, and Mercenaries 2: World in Flames was among them. Scheduled for release later this year, Mercenaries 2 is an action-packed third-person shooter in which you'll assume the role of a mercenary looking to capitalize on an international crisis that a power-hungry dictator has brewing in Venezuela. In keeping with the open-world-style gameplay of its predecessor, Mercenaries 2 will give you the freedom to complete mission objectives any way you like--preferably with plenty of explosions along the way.

The demo that we saw tonight comprised only a single level, in which your mission is to blow up a mansion on the other side of a decent-size map. The start point was a small pier, where carefully stacked oil drums afforded the Pandemic Studios representative playing the game a great opportunity to show off the game's physics engine. Every object in Mercenaries 2, including trees and buildings, can purportedly be blown up, and there will almost certainly be a lot of fun to be had in coming up with creative ways to use that feature against your enemies.

Conventional ways to deal with bad guys will include pistols, machine guns, rocket launchers, grenades, and sticky C4 bombs that can be detonated manually after you attach them to something. You can stick a couple of the bombs onto a vehicle and then send it into an enemy bunker before detonating them, for example, which is exactly what we saw done during one of the more memorable sequences from what was obviously a well-rehearsed demo. The vehicle on this occasion was a small jeep, and the game's garage of more than 130 vehicles will also include tanks, APCs, boats, street cars, helicopters, and the like. You'll be able to purchase or steal and subsequently use every vehicle in the game, and when attempting to acquire a new ride with something other than legal tender you'll find that it's not always as easy as just pushing a single button.

When attempting to steal military vehicles in Mercenaries 2 you'll invariably find that their occupants are reluctant to hand over the keys, so you'll have to do battle with them in vehicle-specific and quite cinematic minigames. The minigame that we saw involved stealing a tank, first by climbing up onto its gun barrel, then by walking along it to the driver's cab, and then by pressing the buttons that you're prompted to in order to knock a gun from the driver's hand, grab a grenade that he's wearing around his neck, and then toss it into the cab with him.

Obstacles en route to the final objective included small enemy outposts and guard towers, none of which were any match for the power of the tank, the rocket launcher, and the aforementioned sticky bombs. A powerful enemy tank made for a more challenging encounter about halfway through the level, and rather than going toe-to-tread with it, the player opted to retreat to a relatively safe location and call in an air strike. Air support won't come cheap, of course, but it's well worth the money--as demonstrated on two occasions during the demo. The first was a "surgical strike" that let you pinpoint your target using a camera positioned directly above the battlefield. The second, which marked the end of the demo, was a carpet bombing run that made short work of the mission's ultimate objective. At the end of each level, a results screen of sorts will detail how much money you've made and how much damage you've caused, along with a number of other statistics that serve both as a source of amusement and as a gauge of your performance.

The demo managed to pack a huge amount of action into only five or six minutes, but it served as a great teaser that has certainly left us hungry for more. EA's fact sheet for the game makes reference to split-screen and multiplayer support, taking jobs for different factions, recruiting other mercenaries to assist you, and capturing drop zones that you can travel between instantly if you find yourself too far away from the action. Those features are just bullet points on a piece of paper right now, but we look forward to bringing you more information as soon as it becomes available.