Whatever happened to those fantastic developers of the 80s? Seriously, the list reads like a VH1 (or even worse...a Spike) documentary waiting to happen: Acclaim, dead in 2004 and a bad joke for far too long. Accolade...gone since '99. Epyx...dead in '94. Mastertronic, a.k.a. Virgin Mastertronic, a.k.a. Interplay, dead in 2004 with the same sad tale as Acclaim. The only one still really thriving is ECA, now just EA, a.k.a. "The Bane of the Gamer".
One of those other companies just hanging around, a dilapidated, hollow shell of its former self is LucasArts. Back in the day, these guys oozed more creativity than Gordon Gecko had greed. Maniac Mansion, Zak McKracken, Day of the Tentacle, Sam & Max Hit the Road, Full Throttle, Grim Fandango...can you name a company that has created more memorable characters in one-off games? That is how high they set the bar. They didn't go back to the well...they just started digging for gold instead, and found it.
Enter 2005. If it doesn't have "Star Wars" on it, LucasArts ain't making it, or at least isn't making it any good. They've tried going back to the well...only to find they've lost the ability to pump water. Now we have Mercenaries, a game so derivative, the easiest and most accurate way of describing it is to call it Grand Theft Auto: North Korea. Time to go for a jarring ride in a LucasArts-carjacked Rockstar-created world.
Story
The game takes place in what is basically present-day North Korea. President Choi Kim (They didn't want to make it TOO realistic, it seems.) beings to realize that maybe his people dining on tree bark kimchee isn't the best way for them to live, and starts thinking about trying this newfangled non-Dictatorship thing. Or at least he does until he ceases thinking altogether after taking too much metal to the brain. A new dictator rises to power, General Song. He doesn't even bother giving himself a new title, since he's so busy commissioning huge statues of himself all over the freaking countryside.
So, the UN forces (Allies) move in to quash this new dictator and a new "Deck of 52" is made up, but this time, instead of Iraqi criminals, they're a bunch of North Korean Guys. You work for a mercenary group called ExOps, and agree to head to N. Korea in order to grab the big cash prize...100 Million Dollars! While General Song is the big bounty, capturing the other 51 cards in the deck will also earn you and your company a nice fat paycheck.
ExOps decides they can only send in one person, so you choose from either the ethnically mixed American from San Jose who can withstand more damage, the crazy Swedish guy who thinks excessive force is almost enough (and looks oddly like my co-worker.), or the cover ops specialist from Hong Kong who speaks with a British accent.
Gameplay
As I said before, imagine Grand Theft Auto, but set in gritty North Korea. You can run up and hijack any vehicle, and they won’t put up any fight at all. In fact, you can commandeer army tanks, and then after getting the tank, honk the horn to have the dispossessed solider jump in the vehicle turret to help you shoot.
On foot, use the Black button to cycle through your two weapons. Right trigger shoots, A reloads, and X coldcocks people. Y serves as your standard action key. Your D-Pad will bring up support options, such as calling for a pickup, ordering an air strike, or planting/detonating C4.
Initially, you’ll just be helping the Allies’ faction, but once you get further in the game, you will be able to help out 4 different factions all trying to snatch up North Korea for their own purposes. Each one will have leads on different Deck of 52 members. Complete a mission for that faction, and that faction will provide you with a lead on the Deck of 52 guys they know about.
Once you've finally located one of the Deck of 52, you'll fend off a few soldiers, and either capture him, and shove him in a helicopter for questioning, or just take him out and get a picture of his body for posterity and the papers. After dealing with a certain number of them, you’ll have enough intel to ascertain the whereabouts of the Ace of the particular suit you're trying to clear out, and get clearance to take him out.
Sound simple? It is. It’s also repetitive.
If you’re looking for other stuff to do, there are $ icons all over the map where you can pick up odd jobs, like trying to race from one section of the map to the other, ferrying a journalist around, or helping out with some North Koreans who are causing havoc. You can also look for stolen artifacts or Weapons of Mass Destruction. In Mercenaries, though, they actually exist.
Graphics
Not so hot. The characters look ok, but the animation is very jerky. I suppose it's about up to GTA standards, but if you'll recall, nobody was raving about those graphics and animation either. The textures in the game are fairly shoddy. You can tell at certain points in the game that they just tried to reuse the same road texture, and then when it gets to a curve, the texture's just rotated, so you have an angular, sometimes entirely disjointed series of yellow divider lines up and down the road.
The only thing that seems to have any care directed its way are the explosions and resulting detritus. Blow up a tank, and you can knock into its smoldering carcass to have it disintegrate under the weight over your tank. So, the game's got that going for it.
Audio
Music is fairly drab, changing tunes as enemies are spotted, etc. But there's so little new music, and so much repetition of what is there, you will quickly tire of it. Average, at best.
Effects on the other hand are done pretty nicely. Explosions, gunfire, the jostle and play caused by the jerky nature of the tank treads, and the main body assembly. This is all done pretty nicely.
The voice-overs are pretty nice, although sparse. You'll get 1-sided dialogue from the various operatives telling you to go on missions. Your op will tell you various little details about the missions once you've accepted them, but aside that, dialogue is probably the sparsest sound effect in this entire game. What is there is done well, though.
The game incorporates little sayings in each of the four major languages into the game. Civilians will yell at you when you take their 4-door passenger vehicle (which will never be holding more than the driver.) and the soldiers of the respective factions will start yelling for their allies in their respective languages when they are under duress. Slightly below average music, with good effects and good voice acting means that the game's earned a good score in the Audio department.
Gripes
Sorry, Pandemic. Great ideas and no execution lead to a huge gripes list. This game could have been fantastic, as derivative as it is...but once you're more than 5 hours in, boredom, repetition, and horrid gameplay flaws bog this game down more than a World War I trench battle.
First off, the AI. The AI is dumb as bricks that didn't graduate from Brick Elementary School. I realize that having 30 complex AI scripts run at once can bog down a game, but you also don't expect to be in the middle of a firefight, and have your enemies crouching and facing in the opposite direction after you're been spraying automatic weapons fire for the past 30 seconds. Soldiers wielding RPGs will fire them point blank at you despite the fact that they are in the blast radius. Dynasty Warriors and Drakengard didn't have enemies this stupid, and there were far more on-screen. I don't see any reason why Pandemic couldn't hit the bottom of the AI barrel. The only intelligent thing I've seen them do is dodge the slow moving RPG fire with their jeeps. Aside from that...it's all downhill.
Next comes the vehicle control. This is probably the poorest control scheme I've ever seen for a game that relies this heavily on vehicles. None of the automobiles "feel" fast, they're just easier or more difficult to control. In fact, I've run down jeeps with a tank, and I've run down cargo trucks on foot. That ain't right. The control is also appalling. If you look at any treaded vehicle, they clip into the ground a bit. This isn't a huge problem visually, but take it over a seemingly flat bridge at full speed when you're not in the center of the road, and the treads will catch on something, hurling you and the tank into and over the railguards, ultimately into the river.
What's even funnier about all of this is the fact that I can take a tank straight up and down the side of the mountain while having no damage occur to the tank. This should not happen. Ever. I've cleared missions where it was obvious that I needed a helicopter, or to discover a secret path, but I just opted to take a tank straight up the side of a mountain. Surprised to see a tank up here, soldier boys? Oh wait, you're all facing the wrong direction...
In the event that the stupid soldiers do manage to whittle down your health, usually due to a good solid shot from a tank, or just from being exposed to helicopters and automatic fire for too long, you'll go into this "zone" after you fall below a certain amount of health. You'll start to gradually recover that health up to the limit, and things will slow down, so you can presumably find cover. However, it's far easier to just shoot everyone in the head, and hence you tend to just stay at low level health because it honestly doesn't make much of a difference. You also get loads of invincibility cutscenes. Any time you hijack a vehicle, capture a prisoner, or pick up a prisoner, you're completely invulnerable. You can easily exploit this to big advantage when taking on a large mass of troops. Pop him in the face with the X button, then pres Y to wrap him up without worry of being perforated while cuffing your victim. This makes those Deck of 52 missions an absolute cakewalk. Run in, smack, cuff.
Then there's the douchebag factor. When I had initially heard about the game from ads and such, I thought it was a cool concept. It looks like what I liked most about Silent Storm but, in real time and with modern weapons. One of the guys in the forum said he was opposed to the mercenary concept, and posited that they should have just called the game "Douchebags" and had you wander the globe just being a huge jerk to everyone. That's not far from the truth when it comes to Mercenaries. The most sympathetic character in the game is an old Russian ex-KGB operative who gets double crossed...that's pretty darn sad when a grizzled Mafia boss is basically your only "good guy".
Since money is the only thing that matters to you and the ExOps Crew, you'll go from helping the South Koreans fend off an impending North Korean assault, to causing the South Koreans to lose their entire invading force at the behest of the Russian Mafia. Hurt someone's feelings by ending the lives of hundreds of their soldiers? Not to worry. A little cash is apparently the best "I'm sorry I decimated your troops" card money can buy. Bribe the guard, and everything is peachy keen again.
Seeing as how the repercussions of utterly slaughtering scores of troops and "angering" their faction is so insignificant, you may as well just steamroll whoever gets in your way...meaning that being a douchebag is the path of least resistance in the game.
I could go on into far more detail and list far more gripes this game possesses that make me see red, (inconsistent damage, gravity defying objects, asexually reproducing boxes, lame ending.) but why bother? I think you guys get the point now...this was done poorly in a lot of ways.
Overall
Could have been good. Could have been significantly more than good. However, LucasArts and Pandemic teamed up to make Mercenaries not even average. This is a rental at best. I don't see most people playing this for a whole week, unless they're the sort that drove around in all 3 GTA 3 games trying to pick up every little package and find all the easter eggs. There's no reason to play the game through a second time, either, as the other characters won't give you anything different in terms of gameplay, aside from a few different voice clips when they talk. I really don't think the prospect of playing through the game as Dr. Indiana Jones, or discovering where the North Koreans left the Block of Carbonite lying around is all that fun-tastic.
I honestly expected far more from LucasArts after playing through Secret Weapons over Normandy. As the end credits rolled one of the guys at the museum they used as a consultant was talking about how impressed he was with the devs for knowing their stuff, and being committed to making the game historically accurate, and their attention to detail. Where did all that concern go? It certainly wasn't present in any form in Mercenaries. Somewhere in the back of the LucasArts Ranch, Green Tentacle hangs his…erm...head in shame. The one shining ray of hope in this game is the hopefully more game companies will seek to utilize more Asian heroines with British accents. Come on, LucasArts...it's the least you can do after this stinker.
