Mercenaries 2: Huge Preview with Pandemic

Join us for a detailed look at open-world destruction-gasm Mercenaries 2: World in Flames, as we chat with Pandemic Studios' Jonathan Zamkoff and Cory Lewis.

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Kikizo: Do you have auto-targeting in the game?

Cory: Actually it is there but not in the sense you think it is. It's more like the Call of Duty 4 style so when you hit the left-trigger it zooms, just like Call of Duty, and it will actually snap you a little bit toward your target. Then it's up to you whether you want to go high or low - a leg-shot or a head-shot kind of thing.

Kikizo: Something else that was interesting is that you're shielded when you're in a vehicle, although the vehicle does tend to blow up fairly easily. How are you looking to approach that balance?

Cory: [Laughs] Well, early on in the game there are a lot of vehicles that are weaker. A lot of it is down to fuel acquisition, where you're driving a junker that somebody drove by on. Some of the semis are fairly more robust. But later on you'll start to get better vehicles like tanks and armoured vehicles. And you recruit a mechanic and he'll actually upgrade your vehicle and add crazy stuff to it. He'll take a sports car and add a rocket launcher and armoured plating on it and it's this crazy use of a sports car where the engine is used to blow stuff up. Everything is destructible and all vehicles have week points as well. You'll see like a heat shimmer on the vehicle and if you attack that spot it will die much quicker. So you might have just been unlucky maybe and you were being shelled in the right spot. Some vehicles are hard to miss the weak spot, but it works out well for gameplay when you're attacking those vehicles. You get bigger rewards for actually attacking the weak points. Not only do they die quicker but you'll get a fuel bonus. They'll drop fuel and things like that.

Kikizo: In the previous demo there was a strong emphasis on how absolutely everything is destructible. Is that something you can talk a bit more about?

Cory: I was mentioning to someone else, they were curious what percentage [is destructible]. It's like 150 per cent. The only things you can't destroy are like the ground you walk on. You can't punch a hole to China. But, for instance, if you're in a city, you'll actually sometimes shoot the road that you're on and the road will collapse, just literally crumble under your feet, and you're like, "Whoahooah." And it's actually an overpass and you didn't realize that there was a road going under it and you've just collapsed the road down onto the lower section of the city. So in some ways it's surprising. Even me, as a I play it, I wouldn't expect certain things to go and they do.

The main thing is, if you can afford the weapons that are needed to destroy it, that's the key. Some of these [demonstration units] we have infinite ammo and things like that on where it's really easy to just destroy everything, but as you play through it it's going to take money to level a city, and that's something you earn through play. So that's how we balance the destruction. It's awesome. It's so much fun to watch these things go. And there's persistence in the world too, where if you do that and go to one end of the map and come back, it will stay down. It doesn't reappear until you completely bail out and come back.

Kikizo: That sounds cool. Thanks for your time Cory.

Our thanks to Jonathan and Cory for their time. Mercenaries 2 is out at the end of August or the start of September, depending on which part of the planet Earth you live on.

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