I think of Grand Theft Auto 2 as the ‘lost’ GTA. The first game in the franchise was infamous, the third, revolutionary. Vice City and San Andreas, perfected and then ruined, respectively, the 3D formula. Everything since has made a mark in its own way. But GTa2, to use it’s original, confusing, stylisation has been largely forgotten.
It’s near-future setting is a huge anomaly for a series that has since made its name through twisted, quasi-real world environments, but the game had something else that hasn’t really been (successfully) revisited by the franchise since: Factions.
In Gta2, you took missions from one of three gangs and this would affect the way the other two treated you - carefully balancing your allegiance was key to success. And it's this that, at long last, brings me to Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction.
First appearing a year after San Andreas, Mercenaries’ approach to the gangs/factions mechanic is far more satisfying than the ‘afterthought’ treatment it was given in Rockstar’s first miss-step.
Set in a scarily believable Korean war zone, here, you take missions from one of four leaders and, depending on which you choose, it not only affects the reception you receive from the other 3, but it can also affect the availability of missions, the price of weapon drops, and several other little elements that make the gameworld seem surprisingly alive.
I say ‘surprisingly’ because this isn’t a lavish big budget game built with production values to match, but there’s plenty here that class the game up. Voice acting, for example, is top notch despite by-the-numbers characterisations, the map is varied and a decent size, despite a healthy amount of fog to hide the pop-in, and, despite there not being much else to do in the world, the missions are varied in both their structure and the completely open way in which they can be completed.
And this is Mercenaries’ ace card, (foreshadowing alert); being able to choose whether you want to wade into a war-zone in a jeep, an APC, a tank, or a helicopter… whether you want to roll in the front gate or snipe from a nearby hilltop... whether you want to carefully pick your way through enemies to capture a target, or storm past all the grunts to assassinate your prime target with extreme prejudice... Mercenaries has you covered.
And when ‘Plan A’ goes to hell, you can just choose an airstrike from the smorgasbord on offer from the black market store on your ‘PDA’ (Remember those?) to get you out of trouble.
As the name would suggest, this is a game concerned with dolling out violence for money; as one chinese NPC puts it: the two cornerstones of western civilisation. You’ll need plenty of the latter too, those airstrikes don’t come cheap, nor do any of the other supplies that can be air-dropped to your location to help complete your current objective - something apparently lifted wholesale by that other great open-world series, Just Cause.
Each mission completed will provide a reward, but the real big bucks come from finding, and capturing or killing, one of the ‘Deck of 52’. These are high profile targets with each suit of thirteen serving to break up the story into quarters, and the ‘Ace Card’, being the hardest and most lucrative, serves as a kind of boss battle.
But it’s worth reiterating that, no matter whether you’re going after the low hanging ‘2 of Clubs’ or the end-game ‘Ace of Hearts’, you can do so in whatever way you see fit. There are objectives but not really any rules - so when you accidentally roll a tank onto a target you were supposed to capture it’s no big deal - take a picture of the corpse and send it to your contract handler. You’ll only get half the agreed price, but it’s still a healthy wedge.
I’ve not made a secret of the fact I’m a big fan of open-world games with distractions around every corner, and there’s no hiding that Mercenaries doesn’t really do this. But the free-form way you can go about missions more than makes up for it. Earning money for causing destruction on your own terms is always going to be a winner, and this is a game that makes that a reality in a very satisfying way.
No comments:
Post a Comment