IGN posts first Mercenaries 2 review, no bed of roses seen

8 out of 10! That’s more than I expected, to be honest.

I played the first Mercenaries game on PS2. It wasn’t bad but I got bored after about 6 hours into gameplay and never picked it up again.

Let’s wait what Eurogamer.net has to say in it’s review …

IGN though, innit. The review’s pretty scathing. The “.1 under 8″ thing’s deliberate, probably.

The AI really seems to be “dumber than dirt” …

And just being able to “blow things up” is not incentive enough to buy this game IMHO.

Seems a shame.

These guys worked pretty hard, but that long in development I guess can make you pretty ignorant of problems like that.

I think Red Faction looks great though.

Even if I am not one for mindless pointless destrcution, the afct that they got actual architecturally sound structures is pretty amazing.

looks like it deserves less than an 8.

I wasn’t really interested in this at all, then I watched the review on Playr at the weekend and thought it looked alright!

/goes against the grain

Yeah, it “looks alright”! But unfortunately that’s about it. For a game that had such a long development-cycle “alright” is not enough.

EA was clever in launching Mercenaries 2 already in early september. This game wouldn’t stand a chance if released in october or november. So many other games which are way better will hit the market in this upcoming holiday season.

OMG !!! OMG !!!
Eurogamer’s Review of Mercenaries 2 is out and they gave it a 5 out of 10 !!!

Ouchh!

shit

Eurogamer are such idiots when it comes to reviewing.

I don’t even care, about bugs. I am sorry but it’s free roaming, destrctible environments …

I just don’t undertand such a low mark.

Blimey. Well, there we are.

You don’t care about bugs No_PUD?

“I don’t even care, about bugs.”

Awesome.

/closes all open bugs
/informs producer no more bugs will be fixed
/goes on holiday

Well, I do, but I have seen videos and it’s not unplayable, so 5/10 just seems harsh.

Ironically as I was writing that as I was listening to 1up yours, and the English bloke said 5/10 as I typed it. That confused me.

But yes, it just seems a bit of an injustice with so much work, for a game that ultimately was never going to be enjoyed for anything other than the free roaming destruction which seems very much intact.

Remember kids, 5/10 is ‘average’, not ‘broken’.

That’s the reason I am cross, by todays standards that’s not true.

5/10 is a nasty game to play. It’s playable but it’s not fun. Haze was 6/10 for gods sake!

This game deserved a 6-point-something.

Average is 7 nowadays.

And therein lies the problem with modern videogame reviewing standards.

Yep, maybe I am cross with Eurogamer unjustly.

Just becuase they are breakign the incorrect paradigm.

Eitehr way though, you should follow the crowd, otherwise you do soem damage. It’s like the government chnaging the amount of cash a mint is prodcuing outside of growth.

It creates an inbalance.

Perhaps a rubbish analogy, but I am sure you catch my drift.

Over-score stuff because everyone else does? That doesn’t sound like a very good idea to me. Shouldn’t everyone else be reviewing stuff properly?

Scores out of ten are mostly meaningless anyway. A score out of 5 should be the absolute maximum, then you know precisely where you are.

From the Eurogamer scoring system:

“Five – good enough to survive?
Five is where you really start to fear for a game’s quality. It’s the score that says “don’t buy it unless you’re the sort of person who has to have all the games in a particular genre”. It’s a game that had the potential to be good, but simply ended up saddled with a catalogue of issues that the majority of gamers will not put up with. It’s still playable, but the chances are it’s so generic and uninspired that you begin to question how it was released in the first place.

A five won’t be a disaster. In fact those who won’t have played the better games in the genre might even get a great deal of enjoyment out of it. In a lot of cases scores come down to user expectations, but the standards games are built on are constantly shifting sands; what is ground breaking in one generation is the bare minimum standard a few years down the line, and things we once tolerated routinely can suddenly become very irritating. We hear regularly of games built to brutally tight deadlines, and compromises are inevitably made. Sometimes a key member of the team leaves midway through; sometimes it’s just down to a lack of talent. But it’s not bad as such, it just inspires little but the feeling you could do far better than consider picking up a five out of ten.

One thing to clear up is whether five is the “average”. The law of averages suggests that a five should equate to the woolly notion of what an “average” game is worth. We all know this is rarely the case because it’d be very tough to play every single title in a particular genre to really have a true handle on what the average game actually is; and even then it’s a subjective reasoning that’s inherently flawed. With about 1,000 games being released every year it’s a task of unreasonable magnitude to cover even half of them given the size of our team, but we do play a phenomenal number of games between us at EG (over 250 a year), and will attempt to play all the important games in any give field. The chances are, if it’s not on Eurogamer there’s a good reason why not. Either we’re not sent the game, we don’t have a person qualified to review it, or we’ve too many games to review at any one time, and thus have to deal with them in order of priority. But should five be the average? Yes, but it’s not an exact science. We’ll always try to position a five as our opinion of what an average game represents, but the more significant notion is that it’s the score that tells you to approach with extreme caution.”

Heh. That was written a while back. Sounds about right though.

It’s more than I expected, to be honest.

you can say that again, worst case of necrobump i’ve seen on vg247 so far

It’s just SEO spam.

At last a place to get my Merc 2 branded hydraulic valves!