Offers many thrills and explosions.
User Rating: 9.1 | Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction PS2
Mercenaries is definitely the greatest GTA-like game around. It has almost everything GTA, but it doesn’t seem like a direct copy. Mercenaries takes place in North Korea where a war is waging between five main factions: the Allies, North Koreans, Chinese, South Koreans, and the Russian Mafia. Of these five factions you can accept missions from all of them except for North Korea. Basically you do missions from different factions to gather intel on the “52 cards”, which are the 52 most wanted people in the North Korean Military. This deck is divided by suits (clubs, spades, hearts, and diamonds), each with its own section of the military. You don’t need to do missions to find the cards, but it narrows down the search area by a lot and is very helpful. You gain a bounty and intel after every time you capture or kill a person in the deck of 52. To capture a person you must knock them out then call for an Allied chopper to pick them up, while killing them is pretty straightforward. All you need to do is kill them and then take a picture of the body. Although, if you kill the person you only get half of the bounty that capturing them offers. After doing all the missions for a certain faction for each suit of the deck you gain an opportunity to capture a high card (Jack, Queen, or King). These cards offer much more intel then the regular cards, and are only available in mission form. Once you gather enough information you gain the ability to capture or kill the “Ace” of each suit. These are mandatory missions to progress to the story and the next suit. They normally take place on a separate island that is normally very large and requires you to be somewhat stealthy. One important thing to note is that you can’t capture a card that is not the current suit you are on. So if you plan to capture all of them, you need to get all of the suit you are on before the “Ace” mission. The game also offers a wide variety of vehicles, which are all destructible and can be hijacked. Each faction has its own version of all the vehicles. There are you standard army cars, heavy tanks, anti-air tanks, attack choppers, reconnaissance choppers, and a wide variety of civilian cars. All of these can be hijacked in all cool animations for each one. For example when you hijack a tank you grab onto the turret and climb to the body, and for the helicopter you jump on the rails and kick out the driver. Not only the vehicles are destructible though, everything is. You can take an M1 Abrams to take out a skyscraper or call on an air strike to take out an entire block. There are many different types of air strikes available throughout the game and you either get them from the Russian Mafia’s website or they will be a part of your mission. The cost will depend on your standing with the Mafia and the faction that provides the support. The use of this can cost anything from 30,000 - 1,000,000 dollars, and depending on how many missions you do this can be a little to a lot of money. There are many other things available on the Russian website as well. Besides the air strikes you can buy any type of vehicle you unlocked and different weapon and medical crates. These crates can have a variety of things in them depending on what you ordered. All of these are brought in by a helicopter and dropped off, so you might not want to order it in an “active” environment. These services can vary in price by your standing with all different factions. They are friendly, neutral, unfriendly, and hostile. The North Koreans will always be hostile, but other factions can be swayed other ways. You can gain respect by completing missions or killing enemies in front of the factions soldiers. You lose levels by killing civilians (this lowers your standing with all factions except for the Mafia) or killing soldiers of that faction. When you are “friendly” with them they will provide you cover fire in vehicles and when you are “unfriendly” with them they will shoot at you when not disguised. It gets more difficult to keep all good standings later in the game because they go to war with each other. To raise from “unfriendly” you may also bribe the faction instead of doing the other ways listed. An important thing to note is that the Russians will not offer their website to you if you are in bad standing with them. Another integral part of the game is disguise. When you are in a faction’s or civilian’s vehicle you are disguised as long as no one saw you get in. You lose disguise by crashing the car or honking your horn. Disguise can be good for sneaking, but it can also get you killed if an opposing faction sees you in the vehicle of their enemy.
The game play of this game is very similar to GTA, except there is not auto aim. You can run around to huge areas that are available, one for the first half of the game and one for the other. You spend most of the time taking missions and capturing cards, but there are also a plethora of side missions available. There are standard destroy the enemy missions, but also unique ones. Like when you take a helicopter to find enemy vehicles, pick them up, and drop them down a nuclear tower. In a chopper you can get from one end if the map in little time, but it takes a while in a vehicle. So the map is pretty large. As for weapons, you can carry 2 guns at a time and a mix of grenades. You also have the versatile C4 for traps and car bombs. There are many different types of guns, all of which can be picked up from dead enemies or ordered from the Mafia. This excludes the special weapons you get after capturing all the cards. Another fun thing to do is just to run around causing mayhem. One problem is that all the vehicles handle very similarly.
The graphics, while not perfect, are very, very good. The game looks realistic enough, but the draw distance is way to foggy. If you go to high in the chopper you can’t see anything. One great thing is that the frame rate has never slowed down on me. The sound is also very well done. There is silence, music wise, for most of the time, but the orchestra kicks in at the right time. While some of the gun sounds seem fake there are others done very well done. The engine sounds are well done also. Overall, the sound from Mercenaries is superb. While this game offers no difficulty level or extras, it is very fun and will be played through at least more the once. Plus it takes around 20 hours to beat it the first time through. All in all, this game is extremely fun to play and offers many thrills. I highly suggest picking this up, you will have a great time. 
