Graphics

Graphically, Mercenaries 2: World in Flames is a pretty unimpressive title...which is unusual for a game where a lot of the attraction comes from the watching things explode in huge flashes of light and smoke. In fact, the explosions and flashes of light do look good.

But that doesn’t mean the game itself looks good. The textures are low-res, the animations occasionally wonky and there pop-ups are so obvious that you’d think you were browsing an anime fan forum and not playing a triple A game with a huge budget behind it.

The graphics options for the game are actually quite limited too – in fact, the game doesn’t even support a 1,920 x 1,200 resolution. There are a few options – AA, water effects and so on, but none of them offer up any real surprises and there’s no setting to bump up the texture resolution either. Still, we’ll take a look at what we think the most important settings are.

View Distance

View Distance is one of the most important settings in Mercenaries 2. In fact, based on the fairly limited options, we’d say it was the most important. It controls literally how far your player can see and it comes in three flavours – check the screenshots below.


On the higher settings you’ll note that you can see pretty far, but it is worth pointing out that even here the maximum view distance is limited. If you click for the bigger picture you’ll see a jeep on the road. That jeep represents about as far as the game will draw enemies. If we’d gone any closer then we’d have seen there was actually an inter-faction battle going on there. As it is, the roads appear empty.

On the lower setting you can see things rapidly tail off though and with minimum view distance the skyline is replaced with a blur of white. It’s an inelegant, but effective solution to the problem, so if you’re playing the game on limited hardware then this would be one way to solve your stuttering problems, though one might argue a blindfold would look a little better.

Water Detail

Mercenaries 2 is an all-terrain game and as you tumble along on the all-adrenaline ride then you’ll get a chance to explore on land, air and water. Given that there’s no option to tweak the texture of the land or the quality of the air though, we’ll settle for the water.


The effect here is actually very subtle, but basically this setting effects the number of ripples and so on that appear on the water, giving it more detail and depth.

On the High settings the surface of the water looks more turbulent and disturbed, while pushing it down a notch or two makes the surface look calmer, simplifying the distortions and reflections in the process. Look at the shadows cast on the water for an example of this.

The effect isn’t all that profound when you’re in the game though and at any one time it’s more likely that you’ll be too busy dodging bullets and so on to take in the quality of the water. If you can manage the higher setting then good for you, but if not then there’s nothing to be ashamed of.