Review: Dragon Ball Z – Ultimate Tenkaichi (PS3)

Having spent a whole lot of time playing Mercenaries 2, which I picked up for $20 used a month or so ago and which is now being sold new for that price, I can fairly say the game is worth it. It’s expecially worth it if you’re a fan of open-world sandbox games; if you like earning in-game currency and being able to spend it on meaningful items and vehicles to enhance the experience; and if you like earning PS3 Trophies while you play. (It’s also available on the Xbox 360 and has a full set of Achievements too.)

The game really is a next-generation iteration of the Mercenaries franchise that made quite a splash back on the PS2 and Xbox. If you’ve played that game — I only did so just over a year ago — the moment you first jump into a car and hit the road you’ll know the same developers did the work on both titles.

It has a reputation for being a bit rough in the graphics department and for being glitchy, and I’ll be the first to admit that the enemy AI is less than stellar, but I think the patches that were released for it cleaned up any game-breaking problems before I could ever see them. I have seen a few wacky things to be honest — I had one situation where Mattias refused to regenerate health and another where a friendly faction couldn’t remember I was friendly after they blew the enemy chopper I’d flown in out of the sky — but after maybe 60 hours of gameplay this is nothing that reloading couldn’t fix.

Which leads me to my number-one piece of advice if you play this game. Turn off auto-save immediately, then save in multiple slots, one per day that you play in case you decide to go back and do something differently. My number two bit of advice is to read the Trophy list carefully, specifically the ones about Verifying vs. Capturing the High Value Targets (HVT’s). I didn’t realize until too late that killing a single HVT — or, more accurately, allowing the thick-headed AI to kill its own HVT by firing rockets near him at point blank range — means no gold capture trophy for me unless I opt to replay the entire game again. That’s something I’m not too keen to do with my backlog of games waiting for me.

The number two piece of advice is echoed by the online guides I’ve seen: always save in a separate slot before doing the Battle for Caracas mission near the end. That mission is immediately followed by an event that closes off part of the map permanently and then triggers the final mission of the game without giving you the option to save first. So if you forgot to do a few missions you want to take care of, you’ll be out of luck.

Now go have some fun, play some online co-op, and enjoy the pretty explosions and cool-looking vehicles, tanks, and helicopters (my favorite!), and bring in some Trophies to boot.

If you’ll excuse me, I need to get back to my new boss the Chinese. It took a $161 million bribe to get them to forgive my previous missions against them for the Allies and they have a list for me of enemy facilities to destroy and HVTs to capture or kill.