Mercenaries

"The "Playground of Destruction""

At my First glance on the gamespy review, I didn't know this game, I didn't know what the hell is this game, I even didn't know who create or publish this game, and I didn't know that this is a good game!
This game is a third person action game or I should say one of the nicest third person game in PS2 console, I never believe myself when I saw a Lucas Art logo at the beginning, because Lucas art game is usually a space star wars game... but this time is different...to my review then.

GRAPHICS -->8/10
I'm not a person who put graphics above anything else, graphics place second to me and guess what? Mercenaries Graphics are really amazing, although it is not as good as Metal Gear Solid 3 Snake Eater, however because of the explosion effects and character detail, this game is consider got a very good graphics, the character rendered in a good detail and smooth animation (probably they are using real actor like Dino Crisis 2) the explosion effects is very cool and like real, buildings, guns and cars looks awesome most of the things you saw in Mercenaries can be destroy with many ways by using C4, Grenades and etc, explosion effects of the C4, Grenades, Air Strike is very cool hust like real thing which comes the title "Playground of Destruction", the only thing that Mercenaries lack is the environment detail and also shadowing, perhaps this is for performance issues, Mercenaries run at 30 fps average, means sometimes Slow down occurs although not much but as a hardcore gamer I feel this is a little bit ...annoying, but as for XBOX Mercenaries run at full 60fps, so you can tell now which hardware is more superior.

STORY -->8/10
Not much for the story, you are Mercenaries of ExOps hired by allied and told you to do some "Destruction" to enemy forces, choosing different characters will not affect the story only different Dialogue, so the setting is where the North Korean is your life time enemy, you work for the other factions like allied to find "deck of 52 cards" no, not finding the cards but to find and capture 52 bad guy which represent by the deck of cards. not much to tell from the story and to avoid Spoiler, I better keep quiet...but not bad for the story.

GAMEPLAY -->9/10
Now this is the real fantastic thing, the game-play is like GTA3+Allied Assault, a single-player game, you can roam the area freely(although not too freely), at the beginning of the game, you are given choice of characters, there are three character you can play, each character have different abilities of course but does not affect the story, the difference is the dialogue, thus there's no easy, normal, hard settings, in the first mission unlike Metal Gear 3 you'll get equipments, good equipments a Colt M4A1 Carbine(my favourite weapon in Counter Strike, yay!), some grenades and a PDA, control is much like The Suffering, left Analog is for movement, right analog is for aiming, square is for bashing, reload is X, triangle is pick up things like guns, circle is jump, R1/L1 is fire/throw boms R2/L2 is to change weapon/grenade type, not confortable I should say although they provide you with big aiming cursor (unlike The Suffering with one dot), you can drive cars (both enemies or allies) even Choopers, you also have allies which will help you when you drive a vehicle with a weapon, you'll be the driver and they control the gun, much like HALO in PC/XBOX, you can also pick up enemy weapons and maximum weapon you can carry is two, so if you pick up the third one, you character will automatically throw away the weapon he/she is carrying and pick up the third one, again this style resembles me of HALO, so last thing I wanted to say about gameplay is Excellent, however I don't like the control very much, and I prefer the put auto-aiming like The Thing cause I never like to use Analog to do aiming.

SOUND & MUSIC --> 7/10
The sound effects is good, but not very amazing, guns firing sounds a little bit too weak explosion sounds good, vehicle sound is standard no problem with that, music is very suitable with the game background, the character voice acting is good, in fact very good perhaps they hire good and experience voice actors.

OVERALL -->8/10

with fantastic game-play, nice graphics and good voice acting, overall I give this Game 8 stars, this indeed is a good third person game and a very surprising game, I never thought in the first month of 2005 There's a good game coming. so last to say this game is more focusing on destruction so if you are the person who like "destroying" This game is your choice. this game is deserve to buy! if you are ready to do destructive mission, go and buy this game you won't regret it.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 01/23/05