Mercenaries

In Mercenaries you’re hired to fight against the bad guys as one of three…uh…oh yeah, mercenaries. The bad guys include the likes of the Chinese, the Russian Mafia, and the South Koreans.

The game is set up using a card system, where you are presented with a deck of 52 cards and each card represents a mission. Each mission will earn you cash that you can use to up your armory for the rest of the missions. The flow of the game is pretty much open-ended and up to the user to decide which path is taken.

For each mission you are allowed to carry two weapons and secondary explosives. You can also call in air strikes if you choose which cause some severe damage. Everything in the area of the strike is usually decimated, whether they are soldiers, cars, or even buildings - and thanks to the Havok engine the way things blow up is very believable. There’s a very wide variety of weapons to choose from, including various rifles, rocket launchers, pistols, grenades, cluster bomb air strikes, bunker busters…the list goes on.

Vehicles can even be considered weapons, and there will be plenty to utilize. APC’s, jeeps, and even helicopters are just a few examples of what you can control. Many even include weapons, so if you find yourself in a tight spot and near an APC, hop in it and man the turret on top. Choppers are also extremely useful since they can be used to reach tall vantage points for sniping, or even can airlift vehicles to locations they normally couldn’t reach. You can even use it to drop things on groups of enemies.

The graphics look very good so far, and thanks to the Havok physics engine things move and react realistically too. I have to mention the smoke effects, because I don’t think I’ve seen it done better in any other game. When I saw something blow up, the smoke that came from the wreckage looked so real. It will even swirl and separate if a chopper flies into it. I even noticed that you can see the holstered weapons on the character when they aren’t being used. Small details like this make the world much more believable.

As if all of what was already going to be available wasn’t enough, support for downloadable content will be included for the Xbox. If hard drive support was included for the PS2 then they could supply downloadable content for that version as well, but we’ll see what happens. There won’t be any multiplayer support in Mercenaries because Pandemic wanted to really focus on bringing a rich single player experience to the player. This isn’t really a problem due to the fact that Mercenaries is just plain fun and open to the player. Right now Mercenaries isn’t planned to come out until early 2005, but it already looks like an excellent action game. 

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