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good concept, annoyingly bad execution

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 4 / 7
Date: October 22, 2005
Author: Amazon User

this game could be one of the best games out there, but it has way too many bugs. here are the most anoying ones: character gets trapped inside boulder and can't get out, game sometimes say there's no controller connected, and the most annoying one - I successfully entered the abort codes for the nukes after hours of really intense battles, eliminated the foot soldiers, then the game froze just as I was about to capture the ace of spades!!! what the heck!!!

how can i put this.... it sucks.

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 2 / 13
Date: November 05, 2006
Author: Amazon User

the only way i can explain the positive reviews for this game are simply my theory that gamers are idiots. they'll play anything if it's given good reviews and other people like it. there's nothing new in mercenaries that hasn't been done before. you accept a contract. you drive around to the bad guy and subdue him or kill him. o...... k. all this has been done before (and vastly more interesting) in games like metal gear solid, call of duty, hitman etc. etc. etc. it's not fun or challenging, or original. also the gameplay itself is bad. shooting people isn't fun here, you just pull the trigger and move your crosshairs across the screen. boring. the graphics aren't very good either. just because other people say it's good doesn't make it so.

Brutal Difficulty Level

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 0 / 2
Date: June 15, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Less than half way through this game the difficulty on the missions (contracts) becomes ridiculous. There are no difficulty levels to choose from. I wouldn't go for this game unless you're a hardcore gamer with a lot of patience.

Yay. Another GTA Lite.

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 3 / 10
Date: May 30, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Mercenaries is good. But that's it, really. It gets really repetitive, really fast. The formula is "kill/apprehend this guy, do it again." Shooting is extremely basic, with main controls being shoot and jump. Its cool that the game is big and open, with lots of vehicles, but it just seems like a lesser version of the popular Grand Theft Auto series. There really isn't anything fun to do inside the vehicles, except drive around. The game gets stale pretty quickly because its so repetitive and seemingly purposeless.

The graphics are average at best. It has that trademark bland, jagged PS2 look with low resolution and low framerate. The colors aren't vibrant at all, but rather dull and muddy. Also, animations look artificial, like they belong in the N64 era. Music is great, but recording quality is pretty bad, resulting in a muffled kind of sound.

Overall, this is a definite rental game. Give it a try if you're curious, but don't buy it right away.

Good fun but lack of depth becomes apparent.

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 3 / 5
Date: August 10, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Fun and frustrating, as one reviewer put it, is the absolute truth. Going off in your own direction is indeed fun but everything you encounter is scripted and set in stone. The freedom is only half-real.
I can't bring myself to play this game anymore because it has gotten boring. With all the things I'm supposed to be able to do, the frustrating elements and lack of variety turned me off for good. The only thing that changes when you are capturing/killing enemies is the scenery. Even that isn't very good. The animations are a little stiff and the level of control you have over your character is pathetic (move and shoot is the extent of it).
The whole production just feels somewhat lacklustre although the core fun factor is definately there with all the explosions, damage and gunfire. There is also more than enough gametime involved with all the enemies to blindly run after. I only wish it could have packed more substance into it's shallow gameplay.

Ok game...

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 2 / 6
Date: April 01, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I rented this game and it was pretty fun in the begining... But after three days of contracts, killing people and driving, I got bored. I mean, the first day I spent at least 5 hours playing it, but then, on the last day, barely 2 hours. The gameplay is pretty nice... Also, the contracts (things you do for factions to get money, like missions in Grand Theft Auto.) got repetitive after a while and pretty frustrating. It basically the same things. Go there and kill this guy. Go and destroy/steal this. There is one contract that I hated. The one where you have to escort a journalist. I mean, do you think that's a real job for a mercenary? And plus, the journalist kept dying. I returned the game 1 day before it was due. So my advice: Rent it before you buy it!

Real Fun but Incredibaly Frustrating

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: June 25, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I really like Mecenaries. You get a bunch of guns, two types of gernades, and a PDA. On the PDA you can buy weapons, cars, trucks and helicopters. Also, you can see everybodies mood towards you. You want these people to like you because they then give you jobs that can sometimes get you alot of cash. But what is incredibaly frustrating is the difficulty in some levels. When you go for the first big bounty, your all alone with a ton of enemies shooting you. Its just really hard, and the more you die, the more frustrated you get. What I do is just get cheats of websites, but I'd rather not do that. I only do that when I just want to get passed the part. In Mercenaries, I would think that most people would want and need health cheats if they wanted to acually beat the game. This reason is one of the big reasons I gave this game 3 stars. The other big reason is the ending. I won't say what exactly happens, but I will say that if your like me, you'll be really annoyed at it. They don't say anything about the money you get, or what happens to your character. They just say a few lines and that's it. Your done. There's also no new difficulty for beating the game, or any bonus materiel. You just continue doing whatever you want with all the money you ended with. Those are the two reasons I gave Mercenaries an overal rating of 3 stars.

Exciting but touchy

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: July 28, 2008
Author: Amazon User

This game, to start off, is like every other war game, in the way that you drive around, Accept a contract and then go kill somebody YADDA YADDAYADDA. I like this game for a few reasons,
Even though the map doesn't get bigger and you don't get an extremely wide variety of vehicles (which sucks) the game shows you how other people think they can make a video game of the cold war. It gets harder and you get frustrated with your health and the missions people give you.

BUt isn't the point of the game to have fun? You aren't suppossed to compare it to other games that have better role play and more weapons.
Just live with it the way it is.

I love this game because I love games where you get to go around and shoot people. That's simply it.
Sure it gets touchy when you don't want to kill someone and you have an itchty R1 finger. And there's glithces in it

BUT IT's FFFFUUUUUUUUNNNN!

Not as fun as expected, but still good

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 7 / 7
Date: January 26, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Opening Comment: This game relates to GTA (Grand Theft Auto) in many ways. First, you can hijack ANY vehicle in the game. Second, you go on missions to earn money. And third, the map is HUGE.

Pros:

- Three different characters
- Many vehicles
- Tons of contracts
- Four different groups
- Many destructible items
- The map is HUGE

Cons:

- Not too many guns (No pistols)
- AI isn't very smart (They can't even shoot straight)
- Its got good graphics, but they could be better (Their like Freedom Fighters)
- Not as fun as expected (Needs more action)

Ending Comment: Overall, a good rental. It should be worth $20 - $40.

Fun game, good concept, but a tad repetitive.

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 4 / 4
Date: September 08, 2005
Author: Amazon User

This was a game which I had bought some time ago, but due to time constraints, was unable to really get into. The game was recommended to me by a friend, who described the game as a cross between "Star Wars: Battlefront" and the "Grand Theft Auto" series. The character controls are very similar indeed to SW:B, which should come as no surprise since Lucasarts and Pandemic are in on both games.

However, unlike SW:B, Mercenaries allows you to free-roam throughout the game's world, rather than being shackled to linear missions. That's where the similarity to the GTA series comes into play. Like GTA, you can accept missions from various interested parties, and if completed successfully, will result in monetary gain. ALso like GTA, you can hijack any vehicle, kill any person (enemy or not) blow up most buildings, and use any weapon, from small arms up to artillery pieces. If the stringent demands of a directed mission is not your speed, you can just roam about the countryside, hijacking and killing at your leisure - you won't make big bucks, but if you destroy any North Korean vehicle or building, you get a bonus.

The main mission storyline revolves around a "Deck of 52", shamelessly patterned after the real-life Deck of 52 which the Bush Administration used in Iraq for various wanted people. The lowest ranking person on the deck is the 2 of Clubs, the highest is the Ace of Spades, which in this pseudo world is a General Song, a ruthless North Korean who usurped power in a coup and is threatening the world with nuclear arms. Most of the structured missions revolve around capturing or killing a deck of 52 person.

However, there are many side missions to earn extra cash, things as simple as getting to a certain destination in a given amount of time, to shuttling food to a needy city, to taking a reporter to film war footage, and a lot of others.

The biggest dissimilarity from GTA (and which I liked for its realism) was that you could only carry a limited amount of ammunition and arms. In GTA, you could literally carry a dozen weapons and enough ammo for each to supply a battalion. Not so in Mercenaries, where you were limited to two shoulder weapons and only a relative handful of explosives. However, you can call in artillery and air strikes (for a fee) and also call for medevac extraction when things got too hot.

The things I really didn't like, however, were the player's limited combat abilities. Unlike the Metal Gear series or Splinter Cell series, your character's movement profile is robotic and mechanical. There's no option for crawling around and stealthily putting yourself in a position to kill or take down an enemy silently. Instead, you can only crouch and move slowly, but not crawl, and there's no provision for wearing disguises. So on a lot of missions, I found that the most effective method for reducing an enemy position was to simply run in close and hose them with the carbine - totally unrealistic, and very GTA-like.

Actually, you can "disguise" yourself by driving a vehicle belonging to any of the various factions, but there's no provision for say, wearing the uniform of a different faction for an infiltration mission. In this aspect, I felt that this game could have really done more.

Still, all in all, it's a fun and addicting game, but unfortunately, even as you capture more and more of the deck of 52, the storyline remains pretty unchanged. Again, more could have been done with this, as war is very fluid and changes things dramatically, and this could have been worked into the game progression, but this unfortunately is lacking.

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