Mercenaries

Mercenaries is a two year old third-person combat and action game. I didn’t get around to playing it until now. I had heard that it was an open format game that allowed you to blow stuff up and destroy everything in the environment. It doesn’t disappoint.

The game play isn’t exactly free form there are missions. The game takes place inside North Korea after the loss of their ‘dear leader’. Your job is to capture or assassinate the “deck of 52″ to finish the job of expunging the old regime. The jobs that you can take include helping out China, North Korea, and the Russian Mafia to eliminate their enemies and targets.

Game-play

Depending on which factions you ally with they give you more vehicles and weapons. You are free to go around and accept hit contracts, collect bounties, steal cars, jeeps, tanks, and over 20 weapons including anit-aircraft RPG’s, SMG’s and Sniper Rifles. With all the different options for hardware you can make up your own ways to complete tasks. You can blow up a tank or an enemy with what ever you like in your arsenal or whatever you happen to pick up. The possibilities for mayhem are satisfying.

You can play as female character Jennifer Mui. Your support contact person is also voiced by a female. She is well covered in combat attire, and she has on a long coat. She carries several weapons on her. She can easily switch from a shoulder fired SMG to a rifle. When you steal a vehicle that has roof mounted weapons you can also operate those. the voice acting in the game doesn’t seem to acknowledge that you are a female character. Her personality isn’t very developed.

The AI is amusing the NPC’s bobble around driving into walls or up cliffs. They run right in front of machine gun fire or walk right up to you while you shoot them. The game resembles nothing so much as GTA goes to North Korea. The cars handle very badly and they flip over easily. They will blow up if you bang them around too hard.

Marketing to Women

Mercenaries doesn’t seem like any effort was made to market it to women. It seems more like they wanted to present three different facets of a mercenary persona and they just sort of stuck her in there. But at least she is there. Some representation is better than nothing.
The game is enjoyable. It’s great when you just want to sit down and blow stuff up and shoot things. The missions are simple enough, steal a tank shoot your way there, grab or kill the target and listen to the sweet sound of cha - ching. It’s nothing special but like a bowl of mac and cheese it’s hits the comfort zone with a 7 out of 10.

Mercenaries 2: World in Flames is set for release in April 2008. From the developer web blogs Jen will be a main character and they are working hard to develop her personality and add depth and dimension to her.

Recently:

• Tomb Raider Underworld : Underwhelmed PS3 Review
• Geek Woman’s Best Video Games of ‘08
• Girl Geek Shopping Guide
• Lord of the Rings Online : The Mines of Moria PC Review
• Good Girl Power : Nancy Drew
• A Glimpse Inside Moria
• Not Much to Write Home About
• Bleach: Dark Souls DS Review
• Adam Sessler : Home is on the Way?
• Myvu on Ellen