Been playing Mercenaries 2 the past couple days, and so far, so good. To me it delivers something I was deeply annoyed GTA4 didn’t: freedom, in a big way. Specifically, the freedom to approach the challenges the game lays out for you in any number of ways rather than revoking player options for the sake of a mood, cinema, or scripted sequence. As I complained in my GTA4 review:

Why do I have to follow the biker gang on a motorcycle when a perfectly good car is right next to me?... If I know where someone is escaping to, why can’t I just go directly there and wait for him, rather than have to stay within 50 yards of his entire, erratic flight?

So far, Mercenaries 2 hasn’t done nearly as much of that. When you force players to play by the rules in a genre that’s built on the concept of being rule-free... um, there’s obviously something wrong with the formula there. (More after the jump!)

Frankly, I never really liked the GTA games for much beyond simply raising hell, so it’s all I really ever played them for. I would spend time plotting out grotesque massacres, stealing and parking cars near some dead end alley or parking garage, using them as a barricade to prevent the cops from driving too close and improvised explosives set off by a spray of machinegun fire when things got desperate. And for all my complaints about GTA4, my biggest disappointment was the fact it didn’t have a tank in it somewhere. (That attack chopper just isn’t the same.)

So you can see why Mercenaries is perhaps a little more tailor-made to my gaming tastes.

In the relatively small amount of time I’ve spent with it so far, Mercenaries 2 doesn’t seems quite as good as the first. There’s just something clunky about it, it feels a lot less polished than the original. With EA acquiring Pandemic, I hoped maybe the game would get the spitpolish is so clearly needed every time I’d seen or played it pre-release, but that didn’t seem to happen (instead, the glitz and shine seems to have gone to the title screen).

Already I’ve experienced weird glitches like: seams in the environment, vanishing objects, wonky camera angles during cutscenes, I fell through the ground once (looking up and seeing all the world above me), got stuck in a innocuous-looking rut between a boulder and hillside, and swam on a rocky coast about 6 feet from where the water actually was. Of the three mercenaries available when you start the game, I picked Mattias… and though I love Peter Stormare, his character is repeating himself way too often. Note to game developers: if you’re going to have the player’s character say something every time he does a frequent in-game action – say, picking up a new gun – you better come up with more than one or two things for him to say.

But I’m still having fun, though. I can be as picky as anyone about a game (maybe more), but if it’s fundamentally fun, I’ll forgive a lot.

I remember once back in college, my next door neighbor, Josh, watched over my shoulder as I played Tekken 3 on the PlayStation, nitpicking it to death the whole time (mostly because he was a bit of a PC snob):

“The rendering is really quite awful.” (He actually talked like that. Out loud.)

“There isn’t a lot of visual clarity on the screen.”

“Oh my, that character design is dreadful.”

“The AI looks terribly cheap, very unfair.”

Then, after about 15 minutes of complaints muttered as I played, he asked: “Do you have a second controller?”

“Yes,” I said. “But it’s not gonna happen.”

He snorted at my open rudeness. “Why not?!”

“Because I’m having fun, Josh. This is fun for me. And you’re being a fucking pamper pail, man. You’re bumming me out.” I could only imagine the nonstop stream of complaints and tongue-clicking once he was actually playing the game, not having to settle for criticism from the peanut gallery.

How could I be sure he would be that way? Because I knew Josh. We all know Josh. He’s on every message board ready to post some criticism of the latest batch of screenshots, in every Gamestop lurking by the magazines waiting to talk to you, he’s even landed himself writing gigs at a few different game magazines. Oh my, the load times. Oh dear, the textures. Oh goodness, the anti-aliasing.

Everyone has an opinion and everyone has to make a buck, so I won’t deny the world’s Joshes theirs. But sometimes that sort of talk and posting and reviewing isn’t criticism, it’s merely being critical… and there’s an important difference. Using the analogy of a book review: the former would be talking about the story the book is trying to tell, and whether it’s a story worth telling or well told. The latter lists the dangling modifiers and questions the use of semicolons.

To me, spending too much time on Mercenaries 2’s technical shortcomings feels a bit like the second example.