Graphics II

OK, we admit it – we lied before. Under the Water Detail section on the last page we said that there wasn’t an option to change the air quality. That isn’t strictly true; there is an option to toggle that and we’ll deal with it below.

By now you’ve probably realised that Mercenaries 2 is a game with some graphical growing pains. There are dozens of texture glitches and Z-overlaps, with weird bloom effects around characters in cutscenes so that they always seem to glow as if they were The Sentry.

A lot of these problems can be attributed to the console origins of the game – it has been directly ported over to the PC, not optimised to make use of the hardware. That can’t cover all the issues though and the flashing, overlapping textures...well, somebody at Pandemic has to own up because there seems to be a lot of graphical issues in Mercenaries 2 that could be very easily fixed.

Sky Detail

So, yes, there is an option to alter the detail of the sky despite what we said earlier. That said, this option doesn’t really seem to affect anything on any of its three settings. Check the screenshots below to see what we mean.


See what we mean? These cropped images show the point where the land meets the skyline and as you can see the texture for each setting is blurry, indistinct and messy. That goes not just for the sky, but the land too.

We looked in a number of places when fiddling with this setting and nowhere could we find a place where this slider dramatically changed the look of the game. There are no low clouds to be affected, no textures that change and only rarely are the skies populated by air traffic. In short, we don’t know what effect this setting has.

Shadows

Ah, shadows. People always underestimate shadows. They always think that shadows don’t have a huge effect, but they really do. They add an awful amount of depth, detail and drama to a scene. You’d be surprised how much information your eye can garner from the nuances of lighting.


As you can see from the pictures above, the effect of turning the shadows off is pretty predictable. The scene loses some of the depth and detail that it held, retaining what it can with basic static shadows and fixed under-vehicle blurs. With the setting turned On however the scene looks a little better.

It should be simple. It should end there. Unfortunately, there’s a fair bit of graphical griping to be had in other areas of Mercenaries 2 and one of these areas is the cutscenes, where player shadows will occasionally make faces seem obscured or unrecognisable. It’s tolerable and rare, but it is there.

The decision then is tricky – do you turn off the shadows to avoid further graphical glitches? We’d certainly recommend thinking about it. It isn’t like the shadows add that much to the gameplay after all. This isn’t exactly Splinter Cell...or is it just in disguise?