Mercenaries

""Hmmm..... lets blow it up.""

Everybody (well most) people love the GTA games. You get all that freedom of choice while doing missions and the sheer fun of just driving around, doing odd stuff. Finding new stuff.
This game is pretty much the same. Just add a spicy flavour of dynamite and Tactical Nuclear Strikes. Anyway, getting down to it.

Graphics: 8

The graphics in this one are top smooth. All the small details are there. The facial features of characters: sweet.

When you call in an air strike, you get all the flashy effects of a smart bomb. Entire buildings fall apart, piece by piece. And they STAY there. None of that "We'll just make it disappear, yeah?" crap.

As good as the graphics are though, they still contain some glitches. The slightly glitchy variety, to be precise.
Stuff like your car falling through a road or your characters hand going through another person. Its small stuff but it matters.

The other downside is the slight slowdown the game experiences when mucho action is going on screen. When a few tanks start shooting at each other, a couple of helicopters are circling the perimeter and and 20 soldiers are rushing you. It can be a bit annoying since the game contains a lot of those situations but its bearable.

Gameplay: 10

This is the meat and gravy of the game. Ze true fun part.

So basically you're a hired thug who has lots and lots of fancy stuff going for him/her.

Your mission is to bring down the military leaders of North Korea. Theres a war going down there, yeah? Anyway, there are different factions in the game a la the South Koreans, the Russian Mafia etc. etc.

Each of the faction can give you a mission and after you complete that mission, they'll pay you and reveal to you the location of a "card", i.e. a one of the major bad guys.

Since you are bounty hunter of a sorts, you can capture those major bad guys by either killing them and taking a photo, or capturing the alive (you get more dough with alive).

You get paid either way and with the money you cashed in, you can call for backup during those missions.
Backup a la a Bunker Buster (the name says it all), Artillery Barrage, Stealth Bomb and so on. You can even call up certain weapons and vehicles to use on your missions.

When you're not doing those missions, you can drive around and have fun any way you want. You can pick fights with soldiers, steal cars/tanks/helicopters. Or go around killing those damnable buildings. Yeah, those frekkin buildings... I have a personal grudge against them.

Anyway, the real fun part of this is the freedom. You can complete the missions ANY way you want. You wanna attack by helicopter? Do so. Blow up everything from afar? Call in the jet fighters. Wanna get up close? Get on with it brother.

Choices make like sexy. For real.

Story:

Damn man, what story? What you looking here for? Its an action game about killing "bad" guys. Move along now, nothing to see here.

Audio: 9

Now heres something to come after. The games got the LucasArt logo imprinted on it so of course you gotta expect some grandois, yeah?

And its here alright. You got the orchestra hiding the bushes whenever you go on an important mission, you cant see 'em though, those sly buggers.

The explosions are fantastic man. Something to hear. Kaboooooooooommmm......
Very nice.

And the voice acting... wow, is it amazing or what. They even got Peter Stomare hisself to go along with this. He voices of one the characters you can play (IMO the coolest one).

There is a huge amount of dialog going on, each character (there are 3 choices) has its own bunch of lines. And the accents are all top-notch. The deep south accent from USA, the Chinese accent, the Swedish one, the British... all nice.

Replayability: 9

The game is great fun. You have a ton of missions to complete in the main game. Then you have the little minigames scattered along a la "Race from point A to B" or "Who can throw a car the furthest?".

Other than, there are plenty of cheats to play around with. You can switch around the skins of characters (Han Solo as a Mercenary? Daymn) and that adds lots of fun.

All in all: 9

This is a polished game. Fun to play and good to play one more time. Just get it already if you havent. Also, keep an eye out for the sequel, its gonna be more of the same coolnes.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 06/04/07