Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction
 

I picked this game up the other night, mostly just because the commercials (back when they aired), were completely awesome ("I will use two grenades when one would do just fine." "I will flip a coin to decide which building to destroy, and then blow them both up anyway." "I will shoot first and ask questions later." "I will be grossly overpaid for doing something I'd probably do anyway." "I am a mercenary and I love my job.").

However, from those commercials, I surmised it would be just GTA in a war zone. And, it does play kind of like a GTA game, if GTA's combat system became about 300 times better.

The content threw me off, though. Where I was expecting a mindlessly violent game, I got a game in which you're told from the get go not to kill civilians. Killing civilians won't get the cops after you, but it costs you money, right up. It explains it as you being part of a mercenary corp that has to take care of PR issues everytime your stupid ass kills a civilian or an ally, and they just take the bill right out of your check.

Also, when you kill your allies their faction gets angry at you, and, eventually, will attempt to kill you on sight. These are the same people you get your jobs from, and the only way to advance in the game is to get those jobs. You kill too many people needlessly and you can guarantee that it's impossible to complete your game.

Even killing the major bad guys is a bad idea, because they all have bounties, of which you're only paid half for a kill. Considering that some of them have bounties around the $150,000 range (and the 'main' baddie has a bounty of 100,000,000), and I've only nabbed 12 out of the deck of 52, that's a lot of money to lose for being trigger happy.

Instead they give you the option of knocking enemies out and subduing them, which will make factions less angry (although still angry) with you, and allow you to take in members of the deck while still collecting money.

Mostly, this makes combat situations that could be easily handled with some C4, grenades, and rocket propelled grenades into something that requires planning and careful work with an assault rifle. Particularily the butt of it. Of course, you still CAN handle these situations with grenades, RPGs, and C4, but you'll just be shooting yourself in the foot.

And, besides that... there is NO set way of doing any mission. They'll give you suggestions, and you have clear objectives (save person x), but they never tell you how you have to accomplish it. Now, that may not seem like such a big thing, until you start to think about all the different weaponry you have at your disposal and all the options. Air strikes, gun ships, helicopters, tanks, C-4, covert SMGs, sniper rifles, shotguns, so on and so forth.

Plus, any thing can be destroyed. This is something I wasn't used to from other games... but say there's some jack off shooting at you from the top of a guard tower and you're having a hard time shooting up that high and hitting him past the railing... just fire your RPG at it and blow the whole thing down. Sneaking into an enemy base? Plant C-4 on all the barracks buildings before you're spotted and cripple the enemy in the truest way. They won't have any troops to throw at you.

Really, the game is just full of options. It's, further, almost entirely non-linear. It SEEMS that you have to go after the deck of 52 by suit in order (clubs are first, etc.), but other than that, you can do whatever you want. Work for the russian mafia, South Koreans, Chinese, or Allied forces to gather your intel, or play the field.

AND, there are three characters, each one speaks a language of one of the factions, allowing you to understand what they're saying amongst each other that they don't want you to hear.

Of course... despite all that, there's still nothing more fun than jumping onto the barrel of a tank, running down it, and tossing a grenade in the cockpit to kill the pilot and hijack the tank.

I agree with you on all points.

My only complaint was that the game sometimes got unrealistically hard. Like when you have to destroy the chinese(I think) missiles and you then go after the jack of clubs. All the while there's tanks and helicopters just endlessly raining ammo down on you.

I also found this game to be pretty fun. The point about the game penalizing you for mindlessly blowing up people is valid, but if you just save your aggression a bit and only mindlessly blow up the North Korean forces, it's fine, since you never do any missions for them anyway. Also, you get money from destroying their vehicles, so it's an added incentive to use the RPG or rocket launcher on them.

Also: British chick who is of Asian ancestry = hawt (like Psylocke from the X-Men, but Psylocke is better cuz she's a ninja too)

SS: That one's pretty easy if you find the jammer first and take it out. Just use the stealth bombs you for free on the missiles, then steal a chopper to get the target. Also, for those stealth things, they start toward you from your target and bomb JUST past where you targetted, so it's best to target as far along the missiles as you can. Even if you go too far and miss the first one, it's easy to take out with an RPG, while the furthest one is a pain.

Guru: Yes. Jennifer Mui is hot. And the NK forces are the enemy. They're the guys who tried to sell nukes to terrorists in the opening sequence, and who are lead by General Song... that's why you get bonuses and no penalties for thrashing them.

Oh, btw, fun as hell... get a chopper, drop a winch on a smaller enemy vehicle, and fly straight up to about 800 meters, and then drop it and chase after it going down/backwards (yes, backwards is away from it, but do that anyway) in the chopper. Just watch the show.

If you get all 20 National Treasures... on PS2 Indiana Jones joines your team. On X-Box, it's Han Solo.

No you unlock a code to become indiana jones. and you can be hansolo on PS2 also. unless theres a hansolo npc somewhere. but i havnt seen that.

It's also very convenient to get the weapons and vehicles you need delivered to your location, instead of having to go to an armory or a garage to pick them up respectively. It really helps when I need a cheap civilian car so I can slip by North Koreans without danger (or any other faction that isn't happy to see me).

Just make sure your planned LZ is clear. It's costly to lose those delivery copters.

On a lighter note, a bizarre little happening: I disabled a Club Card and called in the extraction chopper. Apparently, some issue with the landing caused the chopper to bounce roughly 15 yards into the sky immediately upon landing and come to rest sideways on a slope, in which it then tipped over on its side and exploded, killing everyone aboard and costing me a pretty penny. All I could is just stand there, dumbstruck with a knocked out Card on my back.

Moral of the Story: watch where you toss that signal flare.

Definitely a great game for random violence. Not usually my thing, though. And for some reason I preferred GTA:VC or SA when it came to random acts of insanity. (Maybe I just like the urban thing more than the warzone thing).

I can hear that. For my own piece of mind I just like GTA since it's alot more story than Mercenaries, though Mercenaries is nine times shorter than GTA. I guess I like the "This really is how LA looks." thing, not "This is really how Korea looks."