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SO AWESOME!!!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 4 / 7
Date: January 16, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I played it at the eb games in citywalk in universal studios hollywood yesterday, and i would have got it, but they wouldnt accept credit from universal studios, even though theyre like a hundred feet from the door!?!?!?! But thats besides the point, it was awesome. I used an airstrike and kiled like a thousand guys, and it wassuper easy to understand. Some stuff took some time, but overall, i was really entertained and impressed by this game. It was awesome. Even better than gta! And the best part, that i know of, is that you can steal, kill, blow up, or buy just about anything in the game. Its even better than halo2. Not to offeend halo2, but their one player game SUCKED! But i gave it five stars, because they had good multiplayer. If this had xbox live multiplayer, id throw my copy of halo away!!!

Awesome

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 5 / 11
Date: January 20, 2005
Author: Amazon User

You've read the reviews below...
JUST BUY IT ALL READY!
(Hint... It's cheaper at gamefly, that's where u should get all you're games online).

Much more than just a Playground of Destruction

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: August 13, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I've not as of yet bought "Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction", but I am tomorrow, I've rented it many times, and am nearly through the entire game. I just have to say one thing first: If you just want to kill everything in sight with no consequence, buy Grand Theft Auto, not Mercenaries. If you want challenging missions in which you try to have as little casualties for the faction you're working for, while as many as possible for the other... play Grand Theft Auto. Mercenaries is a whole different game. You do work for different factions, and sometimes yes, all your mission entails is killing the other faction's men, but usually you have to retrieve a truck, or find a package, snipe out a high-ranking officer, or capture one of the Deck of 52. Mercenaries is a great game, nearly one-of-a-kind, and I would recommend it to anyone who is looking for a game in which there is violence, but it is far from senseless.

MERCENARIES is a fun and entertaining, if somewhat shallow experience.

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: January 15, 2006
Author: Amazon User

MERCENARIES is an excellent 3'rd person shooter from developer Pandemic Studios. This talented development studio has also been responsible for `Full Spectrum Warrior' and the `Star Wars: Battlefront' series. Easily one of the best third person shooters this generation and a game that every PS2 and Xbox owner deserves to take a look at.

The premise of the game places you in war-torn North Korea as one of three `private contractors' employed by the private military company Executive Operations (Ex Ops). You are immediately dropped into hostile territory and under attack before you can ever reach your first contact. You make your way across the vast landscape in all manner of vehicles, fulfilling contracts and hunting down open bounties. You main objective is the leader of North Korean forces, General Choi Song. The allies have a 100,000,000-dollar reward for his capture. He has the dubious distinction of being the `Ace of Spades' in a new Deck of 52, representing the 52 most wanted people in Song's military. You get the chance to capture or kill each and everyone of them, on top of working for the local warring factions.

There are a few major players in the North Korean theater. The Chinese, lead by the serious and taciturn Colonel Peng. The South Korean Union led from behind the scenes by the burned out CIA operative, Agent Buford. The Russian Mafia, headed by the off-kilter, hilarious, and in-over-his-head Sergei Voronov. Finally the Allied Nations commander for the region is a no-nonsense American, Colonel Samuel Garret. At first working for these faction generally pits you against their mutual enemy, North Korea. However the farther you get into the game, the more and more their missions will put you at odds with the other factions instead.

Great idea so far, but what about the action you ask? Well, I was getting to that. The game is a 3'rd person shooter in the best sense of the word. Controls follow the typical and effective dual-analog scheme, with one controlling your movement and the other controlling your aim. Combat is the main focus of this game, and it shows. You can carry at most two weapons and two types of grenades at any given time. This allows you to equip yourself based on what you expect to face or your personal preferences. An SMG and shotgun combo for mixing it up close, silenced SMG and sniper rifle for stealth, or an assault rifle and RPG launcher to face most anything. Although you can high-jack every vehicle in the game, with the exception of the jet aircraft the fly far overhead, controls aren't as tight as they could have been. Don't get me wrong, the controls are solid, but some vehicles (such as helicopters) just feel `better' than some of the other vehicles (such as tanks).

One thing that must be said about the vehicle high-jacking, is that it's not as simple as you may think. First you must eliminate the gunner (if there is one, such as on a tank or jeep), then you need to get to a certain point outside the vehicle before you can high-jack it. Let me just say this for the record, that high-jacking tanks NEVER gets old. It involves grabbing onto and swinging your self onto the barrel, running up its length to the turret, kicking open the hatch and gutting the occupants with a grenade before assuming control of it yourself.

Vehicles are not the only weapons at your disposal. What MERCENARIES does better than any other sandbox game (and arguable, any game in general) is the access you have to an incredibly destructive arsenal. There is a thriving black market in arms and equipment in North Korea, fueled by the Russian Mafia (hint: stay on the Mafia's good side). Access to their website, the Merchant of Menace, allows you to order everything from weapon and vehicle drops to artillery barrages and air strikes. The amount of air-power that you can purchase is staggering, including gun-ship runs (hail of bullets from the air, delivered by a C-130 gunship), anti-tank bombing runs, stealth bomber strikes, anti-air strikes, bunker-buster missiles, cruise missiles, fuel-air bombs, and even carpet bombing runs that level everything in the area. With enough cash, you can level every major city on the map.

What's more, all of this is done in glorious Havok physics. Yes, the same physics engine that powers games such as Halo 2, Psi-Ops, Max Payne 2, and most notable Half-Life 2 is present in this game. When buildings are destroyed, debris is blow out, and can hit and harm surrounding objects. C4 attached to vehicles will blow them sky high, as will launching an RPG at the ground right in front of them. Vehicles, crates, debris, and soldiers all flip, tumble, and collide with one another. Needless to say, the RPG launcher is one of my all time favorite weapons within the game.

Another important aspect of the game is the AI. MERCENARIES comes with the good and the bad. The AI can act very stupid at times, however what the AI lack in smarts it makes up with aggressiveness. The AI in MERCENARIES is some of the most stubborn and tenacious I've ever played. Enemy soldiers armed with RPG's will fire them at you at point-blank-range. Enemy personal will try to run you over, even in nonmilitary vehicles. I can't tell you how many times being run over by a North Korean supply truck has killed me. Enemy AI does make use of cover, often hiding behind vehicles and tree. What's more, the AI is programmed with a fluid cover AI that allows them to use debris, crates, and other dynamic and movable object throughout the world as cover. They are smart enough to hide behind a nearby overturned car, or stack of crates. And if you destroy the car or move the crates, they look for new cover accordingly. Just know that the enemy will swarm you, hunt you down, and try their very hardest to kill you; even going so far as to attack you with attack choppers and battle tanks.

Overall, the experience of MERCENARIES can be a bit shallow. The characters lack a lot of personality, and the story is loose and open-ended. But as long as that doesn't bother you, you should have plenty of fun. Its true strength is its open-endedness. Although there is often a `preferred' way to complete a mission, how you go about doing it is entirely up to you. Do you sneak in and pick off the enemy with a sniper rifle? Do you assault them with a hummer, tank, or even helicopter? Or do you call down an air strike (or two, or three) to level the entire area? How you complete each mission is entirely up to you, and the game can be completed without finishing even a majority of the missions. Really, how you play the game is entirely up to you.

Lastly, there are a few gripes I have with the game. For one, trees are indestructible. You can level an entire city and the tallest things standing will be the destruction-proof trees. The draw distance is adequate, and the enemies will never attack you from out of the fog-of-war. But when flying in a helicopter, you can't help but wish you saw that mountain you just hit, a bit sooner. Your character can't swim, so falling over the edge of a bridge or ditching a helicopter over water is a death sentence. Also, I really wish that your actions towards the factions where a bit more permanent. With enough money you can always bribe yourself into a faction good graces. However I can see that they did this as a design decision, as loosing access to the Merchant of Menace shop ran by the Russian Mafia could make the game unbeatable at times (especially the last mission, which often requires the spending of a few million dollars to complete).

Over all, MERCENARIES lives up to its sales pitch, `Playground of Destruction'. The game is an open ended and entertaining, if somewhat shallow experience. Overall, I'd give it a 5 out of 5.

Great game design

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: March 28, 2005
Author: Amazon User

This is a fantastic game in all aspects. The sound, the graphics, the game play, the level design, all of it is awesome. There is a fabulous amount of diferent vehicles with quite a variety of armor, handling, weapons, etc (not to mention an endless variety of hand held weapons...).

The basic premise of the game is great. You're a merc, and you're out to collect bounties on the deck 52 North Korean evil bosses. Each one awards you a cash bounty (cut in half if you kill them instead of take them alive...).

The best part of this game is the airdrops. As long as your SNS signal isn't being jammed by the enemy (which is fairly rare until late in the game), you can order weapons, health, vehicls, and a lethal variety of airstrikes. The airstrikes are hard to summon up at first due to the high price, but once you've collected several bounties, let the fun begin! Again, variety is the key, from bunker busters to tank destoyers to several varietys of artillery (there are dozens!).

The level design in huge, and half way through the game, you get a new map with tons of new cities and secrets to find (including a code to change your skin to Han Solo!).

It's not all perfect, though. The third suit of bosses gets rediculously difficult for some reason, and the third ace boss is just lousy game design. In fact, the face cards of the final two suits (and the final Ace of Spades) are prohibitively difficult for a casual gamer. You can get through them, but they lack the intelligence of the rest of the game. They are just point and shoot sprint fests.

Buy this game, don't rent it, and play, play, play. You get to play three different characters, each with different strengths (though you select one and play the entire game with him/her, and this kind of sucks--it would have been nice to swap between the three throughout the game). The three characters makes the game very re-playable, plus you can continue after you beat it and keep all the money you've earned ($100 million plus!).

Great game, simple but fun design. If you get it, make sure to read the ticker during the news broadcasts; it's great fun for star wars fans.

If you are looking to buy, read this

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: March 21, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Basically, this game consists of many things that other games do not have. This game is kinda like san andreas only for a war type scene. There are many differences as well. In this game you are actually punished for doing something wrong. Such as, if you are allied with the Chinese section of the map and run over a chink, the chinks will start to hate you a little bit at a time and before you know it, they will be shooting at you no matter what your standing with them.

Graphics 9/10- basically, the graphics are perfect except for the cars are a little blotchy and whatnot(whatnot- coolest word ever)

Gameplay 10/10- the gameplay gets a 10/10 because of the idae. Basically there is a deck of 52 cards and each card stands for a person that people want to kill. for instance, the first guy you have to kill or take capture is the 2 of clubs. This goes on throughout the clubs and into the hearts and then to the diamonds and then to the spads until ou capture the ace of spades and you win the game. It is much less confusing once you start to play.( heck, im only 14 and i got it within the first 5 minutes).

Sound 9/10- kinda kinky but what the heck do you really need in such a sweet game like this.

GTA meets Battlefield

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: April 13, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Just the title of the game makes it sound interesting - "Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction". Keywords: Playground of Destruction. You can blow anything up, hijack anything, and, just like in GTA, when you die you magically appear good as new at the local hospital, or Allied MASH in Mercenaries. As a long-time fan of the Grand Theft Auto series video games (I own them all on every platform), Mercenaries is my kind of game.

By the way, I am aware that everybody is comparing this game to Grand Theft Auto and I try not to follow in everybody's footsteps, but this game is so much like GTA it is not even funny. The first thing that popped into my mind when I played this game was, "Wow...this is Grand Theft Auto: Korean War." Play the game once and you'll agree.

Upon hearing the great things about it from a friend of mine in my Sociology class (what a place to hear about shoot-em-up games), I went out and rented it for my Playstation 2...I was hooked. How sweeter could it get? It was like my two favorite games, GTA and Battlefield, collided into one entity. Grand Theft Auto-style mayhem with an open-ended storyline (killer for gameplay, I might add) in a war-torn Korea. When I heard the game was released on the X-box, I had to buy it for the X-box.

Like all other well-made X-box games, this game has got superior graphics and sound. Even during explosions in dense fog (which actually looks like fog), the game does not lag a bit. It is smooth, crisp, and easy on the eyes. Hook this game up to a Dolby Digital 5.1 receiver, and you'll think you were actually in the combat. The sound in this game is great. The one thing I was very impressed with, however, were the games controls. They were easy to learn, and very easy to manage in-game.

All-in-all this game is incredible. The open-ended storyline that you can shape the way you want it each time you play the game gives it one major improvement over all the Grand Theft Auto games, but still keeps that GTA style alive in a warfare simulation. If you are a die-hard or somewhat-die-hard fan of the GTA series video games, and you're like most gamers out there who beg for intense war simulations, then this game will tickle both those fancies simultaneously. For any X-box gamer out there, this game easily is a "must add to your collection" title. You won't be disappointed.

More pleasurable/not as deep as GTA

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: May 06, 2005
Author: Amazon User

GTA really set the mold for freeform gaming,and it is the game by which other "copy-cats" are compared. It truly revolutionized a particular style of gaming. However,Ample credit (and $$)has been laid at Rockstar's feet, so here's to hoping that games can be judged on their own merits from this point on. After all, Miles Davis pioneered numerous styles in Jazz and launched "copycats," but what Jazz fans appreciated was what other musicians brought to Davis's initial creation(s). So, okay, Mercenaries vehicle physics pale in comparrison. But the question is: how does it deviate? Simple: it gives us splendid arcade war! Why would a gamer be interested in the car tricks that one can pull (ala GTA) when playing this? Its WAR! When playing a war game, my motivation is to hurt the enemy before he can hurt me...and since, in this game, I owe no particular alliegence to any nation, I get to cause much hurt.The vehicles are tools o' destruction, for Pete's sake!My only want in the vehicle dept. is that they never provided a heavily armed 'copter.But, man! I sure had a blast when I got my hands on my first No. Korean tank(spent an hour in a No. Korean base blowin' stuff up-cathartic destruction indeed, great escape from the stresses of the real word).Really improved upon GTA's gun targeting system (Rockstar disappointed me so much in their not improving this aspect during Vice City's release, that I'm not buying another GTA game till the fix this).Anyway, Mercenaries' A.I. is dumbed down, but this just made my avatar feel more super-heroic!And besides, some of the missions are difficult (my record, at games completion: died 40 times and had to restart missions 38 times). The final mission was particularly challenging, which really embellished the climatic feeling. The learning curve was just steep enough to keep the game challenging while also keeping it from being frustrating. ANd the second map came just in time to rescue me from becoming bored with the game.First game I've had to play every night (into the wee hours of the morning) since Shenmue II. In closing, X-box version has better frame-rates, less slow-down than PS2 version, but PS2 version looked dang good too.

A great new idea

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: August 15, 2005
Author: Amazon User

this game like other people have said reminds me of GTA, but it brings in some new great ideas I liked including: airlifting suplies and veichles and the life saving cheat drop you could buy (which I liked the portable airstrike the most.)I found little or no problems with this game I am only concerned with 3: 1. The game messes up if u go into restricted areas with god mode on (my fault) 2. u cant fire your weapon when u slide down the hills. 3.the card people die too easily I found myself killing them accidently when i was clearing the area of soldiers.

Stop making comparisons of this game and GTA

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: October 04, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Why do all of you people compare this game with GTA I mean come on enough of GTA give other games a chance I mean just read the other reviews they all finish talking of how good is GTA and not about this game this game is not GTA, does GTA makes you feel good when you blow up things, steal helicopters or tanks in a very stylish way, blow up every building in the game, have the ability to launch deadly airstrikes, the ansewer is NO!!!!

This is a far more different thing, the only thing in common is that it is all in a big area and you can take missions or do what ever you want, in GTA is drive and kill people, here is steat a bulletproof helicopter go to an enemy base and see how they foolishly try to bring you down with bullets and you know what is best of all you dont need to be in a mission to do that, thats what makes this game awesome.

Now let me tell you what this game got to show:
Great sound
Good graphics
Best explosion design ever
Great enviroment detail
It doesnt get slow at any time
Great wepons to choose of (you can only carry 2 at the time)
Great vehicle design (cars dont have good damage design)
Comfortable control
Many vehicles (tanks, helicopters, etc.)
A great challenge and long game (if you dont get to obsesed)
Order airstrikes (anti-tank, bunker buster, semi-nuke,etc.)
Order vehicles and equipment

In all, Mercenaries is a good buy and know better than ever with its new price so now stop reading and clic the buy button now, dont let does idiots that say GTA is far better than this trick you, I really do recommend it, belive me you wont be disapointed. (GTA is as good as this game, is just that everybody compares it poorly so dont get me wrong GTA is also good so if you have a chance or money buy San Andreas also)

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