Release Date: October 1st 2013(PS3/XBOX360)
November 18 2014 (PS4-XBONE)
April 14 2016 (PC) Genre: Third/First-person shooter, Action adventure Publisher: Rockstar Games Developer: Rockstar North Platform: Windows, Playstation 3 & 4, Xbox 360 & One Players: 1 and Multiplayer Classification: R (Restricted)
Multiplayer Grand Theft Auto… who wouldn’t jump at the
chance? I remember back in the days of the first GTA in the late 90’s playing
at school and at friends’ houses where LAN gaming was a very new thing, until
GTA became available on consoles and multiplayer was largely forgotten about. When
the PC versions of GTA3, Vice City and San Andreas came out and there were many
player-created mods that allowed for “Multi Theft Auto” as it was called though
I didn’t get involved as I thought it would be much too complicated to set up.
It wasn’t until GTA4 came around that after finally finishing the singleplayer
I decided to delve into the multiplayer, and despite some issues with that
awful games-for-windows-live system it worked out ok. Free-for-all was fun
where you just drove around the city and shot each other though you always just
ended up going to the airport anyway, I loved doing races especially boat and
helicopter races, one of my favourite activities was the “Team Mafiya Work”
which involved doing ludicrous things for a Mafia gang boss like blowing up
vans around the city or finding disembodied heads and throwing them into a body
of water. Then of course all that died down and there were less and less people
playing in anticipation of course, of GTA5.
The online mode even had an intro similar to the story mode except it was at night and with different camera shots. I especially like this shot of spaghetti junction at night
In this case GTA Online and the
GTA 5 Story mode were almost two separate games altogether as such I decided to
review them separately as well, as the review would have been much too large if
I included both of them. Having finished the story mode and also my review
of that part, I was eager to see what the multiplayer had to offer and indeed
it looked good. When starting up GTA5 you basically choose whether you want to
play online or story mode then still sign in to your Rockstar social club
account. I had an interesting time creating my character as it seems as well as the usual array of options and sliders to change your appearance you have
an option your parents between a male and a female character and use slider bars to switch the resemblance (some of which I
recognised namely GTA3’s Claude, Nico Bellic and Red Dead Redemption’s John
Marston). I chose Claude as my father and some other woman as my mother and
ended up with a reasonably skinny pasty looking dude, but meh he kinds looked
like me and that was fine.
Creating a new character.
Starting the game I actually found that it had a
semi-storyline in itself as there was an intro and everything, you’re
apparently a friend of Lamar Davis who you’ll recognise from the story mode
and he starts you off on a tutorial where you learn the basics of online play,
I almost thought there was going to be a story which you could play by yourself
if you couldn’t find anyone to play with but this was unfortunately not the
case. It turns out that the events of GTA online actually occur before the
events of GTA5 as the GTA Online Protagonistis
actually referred to in the main story, so you meet some characters like Gerald who you haven’t
seen before in the story mode, and Simeon
Yetarian who you have seen before. Simeon guides you through the process of
fitting a stolen car with a GPS tracker and insuring it which is really helpful
as if your car gets blown up or stolen you can get it again, and also being
able to find your vehicle on the map is invaluable when you lose it. The last
thing you need to do is take part in a ‘last team standing’ style activity
which is called a “job”
which I’ll explain more about later, where you face off with a friend or random
player against another team of two in a shooting match around a particular
area.
Gerald and Lamar from the game's intro
After that you are free to roam around the city, which is
covered in icons of different things you can do, there are also some very fun
random events that you compete with other people in the session, things like a
player becomes the most wanted and you have to kill them, or vehicle challenges
like how far you can drive without hitting something or who can make the
biggest air time. There was even this weird one where everyone had to stay in a
circle which got smaller and smaller though I had no idea how you won. As I
walked around I found you had most of things you did in the story mode, there was
still clothes shops and garages where you could customise your car and tattoo
parlours and fairground rides and car washes and barbers etc all the usual
amenities stuff, though there was some notable differences like the streets
seeming more sparse with cars and people probably because of the overload that
players would cause. I noticed that you have character stats similar to story
mode like stamina and skill with certain vehicles, I’m glad to say that now my
driving stat is up to pro-racer, was probably all those races haha.
The Job setup screen in the middle of searching for players, you can see my stats on the right
As I spent a
bit of time walking and driving around, going to stores and purchasing some new
clothes getting used to the controls and options etc, one of the things I had to get used to in this new GTA that I may not
have mentioned before was the interaction menu which is
separate from the pause menu
that has been there since GTA3. The interaction menu was introduced in GTA
online and is accessed by pressing the M key, it’s basically a menu to
customise your GTA online character and your vehicles. You can do things like
change the armor you’re wearing, put on a saved outfit, set your motorcycle
helmet and set it so you automatically put on a helmet when you get one a bike
(this took me a while to work out) looking it up on the wiki I had no idea you
could do that much in the game, it’s also got options for parachutes,
fireworks, eating snacks, your character actions when winning/losing, your
current facial expression, even your walk which I had fun looking at as they
have styles like posh and feminine. Your car options include having it
delivered by your mechanic and things like ejecting people from your car or
remote controlling the doors/lights plus a whole host of other things from
voice chat to killing yourself, truly a powerful tool which I had almost no
idea about cause you didn’t use it much in the story mode as it only had a
small amount of options including quick GPS, inventory, objectives and mission
briefing.
The interaction menu on the top left
You can freely run around the city killing pedestrians or
other players, robbing stores and doing random events as all of this gives you
both money and reputation points
aka “RP” RP is what makes you gain level or rank up and basically allows you to
buy more things by unlocking them in stores and also allows you purchase higher
end houses and start more jobs. Jobs are the main
source of money and RP in the game, you could call these equivalent to the game
modes in GTA4 whereas Race is still my favourite kind of “Job” in GTA5, as well
as this include your usual simple modes such as Deathmatch,
Last
Team Standingas like in the intro tutorial. You also have Missions which to
make things even more complicated are part of the jobs category, they are
basically like the singleplayer missions you do in GTA5 but with other players
(maximum 4). They are started by characters such as Lamar, Gerald and Simeon as
well as Ron Jakowski , Trevor, Lester and Martin Madrazo, so
basically mostly characters from the main story many of which have their own
personal introduction to you.
A mission for the new Lowrider series with Lamar
The missions generally have an ongoing story to
them unique to each mission giver and I’d love to be able to do them all in a
row but it’s require a lot of time gathering friends or trying to do it with
people online though I did manage to do at least some. When not playing with
friends I spent most of my time joining jobs that other players had set up and
advertised via my job list on my phone , this is a great feature as you can set
up a job and invite everyone in the session to join, from the main job menu you
could purchase ammo for your weapons and also purchase more body armor. You
also had Versus
missions which were basically PvP and pits teams of players against each
other, these were similar to the Adversary modes added
later in the Heists update which has different scenarios, two of which Come
Out to Play and Siege Mentality I had a go of.
I play a game of team deathmatch and do ok
Throughout GTA Online’s run since its inception on PS3 and
Xbox 360 in 2013 it’s had quite a bit of downloadable content which introduced various new content into
the game such as, weapons, vehicles, clothes, tattoos and with some such as the
High
Life Update introducing new jobs and contact missions. So when I finally
got into GTA online in 2015 there was already quite a bit there including one
of the biggest updates which was the Heists
Update which as you’d guess introduced Heists and Adversary modes into the
game, something that I actually didn’t realise wasn’t in the online mode from
the start. There are actually only 5 heists, but each include a number of
missions as part of them so they do take quite a bit of time, especially the
later ones. I have done three of them in my time playing and they were all with
friends, which is the best way to do it really, as heists require a lot of
communication and doing this with people over the internet who you often don’t
have voice communication which really doesn’t work. These heists bring out the
best experiences in GTA as they are a huge amount of fun when you were with
friends or just people who were organised and knew what they were doing. Heists
are introduced by Lester Crest who sets you up with The Fleeca Job
heist which is basically just robbing a small bank similar to the intro mission
for GTA though it only needs two people, after viewing the intro you choose
your role of who is going to do what for each . In this heist I was the driver
and designated to keeping the hostages in line, in the end we pulled of the job
and it felt awesome.
Preparing in the lobby for a heist setup, I was a lookout. You can usual see more people in the picture though we were in different setup groups.
The other two heists I’ve done were much bigger and involved
more setup missions, but were ultimately more rewarding and gave me immense
satisfaction to actually finish after playing online and failing most of the
time with other online players. Of the Heists I’ve done the Humane Raid which led to the The Humane Labs Raid was quite fun as I was in
the ground team and had to skydive and parachute into the Humane labs building
and “raid the lab” then get out while the air team held off the reinforcements
though probably the most memorable part of that whole heist was the Humane
Raid - EMP setup which had us sneak onto an aircraft carrier and steal a Hydra jump jet so one of
us got in the Hydra and the rest of us got into P-996 Lazer fighters and then
we had to defend ourselves from the other fighter jets and man, when Kenny
Loggins ‘Danger Zone’ came on while that was happening I didn’t think the game
could get any better, it was one of those golden gaming moments and I just wish
I knew what I was doing as it took me ages to get to grips with the controls.
The other heist, the Prison Break I had a very specific role as the pilot,
I just basically had to go to the airport and grab the plane then fly to Sandy Shores
airfield and await the ground team as they break the prisoner out, I also had
to avoid enemy jets that came to shoot me down but that was done easily by
flying behind them though after reading the wiki I noticed all I had to do was
not leave Los Santos and the fighter jets wouldn’t come, derp oh well. The
mission was pretty hectic as I had to land and take off several times in order
to get enough of a window to pick up the ground team while the demolitionist
held off the cops in their helicopter. We ended up making it but it was pretty
tight, both of these heists were done at the Bluewire LAN party which is the
only way to do it I reckon though you do need internet which is a bummer,
perhaps with friends on skype would be best.
Stealing the Jumpjet and other with the EMP in one of the setups for the Humane Labs Raid Heist. Fly into the Danger Zoooooooone!
Missions and Heists in particular had a difficulty rating
which the session host could change. The difficulty of the job was obviously
the biggest game changer of how many attempts at the mission you’d have you’d
have as when doing a missions you’d have a set amount of “lives” shared by
everyone in the group and when they ran out and someone died then you’d need to
start the mission again. on easy you had two lives but got no extra RP or cash
for the mission, on normal you get 1 life and a 25% bonus and on Hard it’s a
50% bonus but no lives so if someone dies it means a restart from the last
checkpoint, I swear one mission I did we ended up doing it about 10 times
before giving up. It really depends on the difficulty and how good you and your
teammates are but to be honest I think I’d think I’d rather have unlimited
lives to be able to finish the damn mission, sorta like playing Guitar Hero on
easy just to listen to the song. There are still ways you can fail the mission
apart from being killed, destroying a vehicle or killing an npc that was vital
to a mission etc but 8/10 mission restarts were because someone had died. I
swear on the hardest difficulty the enemies have much more health and take a
large amount of bullets to go down, I can’t remember how many times I was
shooting an enemy NPC from afar and hit them in the shoulder etc then they fall
down get back up and I’d go for their head again then miss then have to wait
for them to fall down and get back up yet again. I mentioned this in my story
mode review as well as I swear that blue flash telling you they are dead is a
godsend as how many times have you shot an npc then wasn’t sure if he was
really dead?
I like this shot of me waiting on the roof above a deal which is going down, ready to ambush
Throughout most of the start of when I was playing I had
basically only the weakest type of body armor and a pistol to my name but as I
gathered up my money and more levels I found (through the helpful messages you
receive) I unlocked more items and I purchased more as I went on, lots of
clothes were already available though most were quite expensive so I didn’t
really bother I just went with some normal streetwear though I do need to think
about buying some gear that’s more suited to dangerous combat in the future.
With the weapons as I said before I started off with only a pistol and not even
able to purchase the upgrades for it, but now I am up to level 25 and now have
access to the SMG, Pump
Action Shotgun and Assault Rifle making me a bit more of a force though
sometimes the pistol is all you need if you can get headshots well enough. I
also got myself some upgraded body Armor which helps a lot though it seems you
have to purchase it for each mission which is weird maybe it wears over time. I
must also mention that there was quite a bit of DLC weapons available as well
but they could all be purchased at once, I wanted to level up before I got
access to stuff like that so I just bought the regular weapons which were
unlocked over time, I did indulge myself to the Vintage
Pistol and a Hatchet
though. Having more weapons available does help in missions but if you need
something specific it is usually always given to you.\
Err that wasn't me, really!
I also thought that I’d need somewhere to park my car, so by
this time I had made up enough cash to purchase a safehouse through
that Dynasty 8
site. I had the idea that my character like me was middle-class so I got a
pretty good mid-range house at 4 Hangman
Avein the Vinewood Hills for $175,000 which was a pretty
good price, a goddamn bargain by today’s standards. Even though the actual
advert says it was astronomically overpriced and it was the most expensive
mid-range house, it was an actual house not an apartment and was in a prime
location close to one of the high-end apartment buildings where a lot of people
lived. My character also preferred classic vehicles inc muscle cars like the Sabre Turbo,
street racers like the Ruiner
and motorcycles like the Daemon. I also got the Futo as it’s a crazy drifty little compact and also one of my
favourite cars from GTA4, I even painted it in the same kind of colour that I
always saw it in in that game, and I got the latest version of that classic car
the Injection
for some off-road madness. So looking at the property on the GTA wiki it lists
as having space for 6 cars and two bikes so woo I got two more car and one more
bike option available. All my cars I’ve come across by accident and have stolen
them myself, I might try and find a Hexer
and Sandking
XL for my next two.
My "modest" house
My (not yet full) garage of old school classic
I saw huge potential in GTA online, and it’s true I loved
creating my own character and buying clothes and weapons and cars and having a
house and doing races and missions and heists and riding around with other
players. But there was a major issue that encompassed everything about playing
with other people, it’s just there was so much waiting and failing,I
sometimes had to play for hours before I felt I had achieved anything. There was a few reasons for this the
first was that unlike story mode where you usually just loading the game at the
start then that was it, the game did a lot more connecting and loading in
between, for example when joining a job from a random person you had to first
connect then wait for them to get enough people to join and often this took
awhile and then if you did eventually get to the job continued failure (i.e.
someone dying, especially on hard mode) could break the group and then you
didn’t really end up finishing it. It wasn’t all bad of course you still got
money and RP even for a half-finished mission or heist but it just had no
closure, I’d feel like I had done nothing compared to story mode where if I
played for the same two hours I could get a craploaddone.
"Please don't let me die, please don't let me die, please don't....." etc
It didn’t help that the autokick for being idle is pretty
damn short and often during playing sessions my game had trouble connecting and
I was booted out to story mode though it seems to be better during the last few
sessions. Of course you could argue that If I played with friends where we were
all communicating with each other the majority of issues wouldn’t happen,
though you still have to be good enough to finish the damn thing, also
organising friends all the time is quite time consuming these days. I seem to
not play that many games with friends these days as you have so little time to
play and it’s just not convenient, to be honest I only really get going with
friendly multiplayer at LANs as it’s super easy and organised and fun enough,
at home it’s an issue of time and whether people want to play the same games.
This is the view you get when GTA is connecting to another session or job, it's like your hanging above the city, pretty, but I I've been waitin here for far too long most of the time.
I won’t deny it, GTA5 online is great fun and I love being
able to make my own character in the GTA world, and have my own house and buy
my own guns and cars and clothes though to be perfectly honest in a perfect
world you could do all the missions and stories on your own and had the option
to do it with friends, I would be more than happy to have npc’s with me on the
team as long as they couldn’t die or it didn’t matter if they did as there is a
huge amount of cutscenes and dialogue and mission content that that is very
similar to story mode missions and you don’t have to put up with playing an
annoying character. I’ll admit doing the heists with NPC’s would be a bit weird
and would require a lot scripting so I guess that wouldn’t be possible it’s
just that I want to see more and do more without being hampered by the
availability of other players. That said though the PVP and race events/jobs in
the game are great as they don’t require you to be staying alive or needing to
restart all the time and are great once they get going apart from all of those
freakin annoying custom race maps and obstacle courses that I see everyone
playing now, so I guess I can always go back to the likes of GTA4 style
multiplayer modes if ever I’m feeling frustrated.
Races with this many people were pretty damn epic
So I concede my qualms with the game are few and could
possibly be fixed and my suggestions relatively unrealistic in the long run, I’ve
still got a long way to go with the game and I’m sure it has a long way to go
in itself but rest assured I will still be playing it well into the future,
whether online with strangers, friends, or at LANs and I recommend anyone who
had GTA5 to give it a go, you might just have a ton of fun.
9/10
Things I liked:
Creating my own GTA character
Purchasing and owning things such as clothes, houses cars and
weapons
Collaborating with others players (when it worked)
Fun and exciting PvP and race modes
Things I didn’t like:
Unforgiving idle disconnecting
Connection dropouts booting you to Story mode
Lots of waiting in general for loading/connected and other
players to join
Release Date: Aus 2006 Genre: Third-person shooter Publisher: LucasArts Developer: Pandemic Studios Platform: Playstation 2, Xbox Players: 1 Classification: T (Teen)
Mercenaries:
Playground of Destruction was originally a suggestion then a birthday
present if I remember correctly from my housemate Brok who praised it as an
awesomely fun modern combat style third person sandbox game which he had played
on the original Xbox and then bought it for me on Playstation 2 which was very
nice indeed. Mercenaries was a creation by Pandemic Studios
an LA based developer with an office based in Brisbane who had created games such as Star Wars Battlefront 1 and 2 and Destroy All Humans! and interestingly published by LucasArts.
I had never heard of this game before but was interested and said I would give
it a go.
Mercenaries tells a fictional story of in the Korean Theatre
of War called the Song
Initiative where the president Choi Kim
actually offers peace to South Korea which angers his son Choi Song
who stages a violent coup storming the capital and killing his father before
the country goes “dark” expelling foreigners and giving no communication to the
outside world. After it’s discovered by the Australian Navy that North Korea is
creating and selling Nuclear Weapons, the Allied
Nations led by Colonel Samuel Garrett forms and heads off to North
Korea on the offensive and is soon joined by the South Korean Union led
in secret by the American CIA operative Agent
Mitchell Buford, the People's Liberation Army led by Colonel
Zhou Peng and the Russian Mafia led by Sergei
Voronov.
The very epic title screen and intro
You are a Mercenary working for Executive Operations, or ExOps who are
apparently the league of kick-ass mercenaries and you are basically tasked with
capturing or killing the Deck of 52 for a handsome sum of 100 million dollars no
less. The Deck of 52 is basically a full deck of cards each one representing a
person of interest to the Allied Nations with the number cards being the lower
ranked and the royal cards being the more powerful VIPs with Song himself
included as the ACE OF
SPADES! You have a choice of three different characters Mattias
Nilsson, Jennifer Mui and Christopher Jacobs with Brok suggesting I use
Jennifer as she has some pretty good one liners and also because I hardly ever
use a female character so I thought what the hey.
The Deck of 52 from the Exops initial briefing screen, please excuse the subtitles it was the only one I could find.
This initial story is shown to you via actual live footage
pieced together then has one of the most terribly acted dialogues between one
of the officers in Exops and Fiona Taylor who is
your main contact in the organisation though unfortunately she sounds like
she’s come straight from an episode of Round the Twist as her high pitched
lighthearted sounding Australian accent is annoying and not suited to the role,
what I’d give for someone with a posh British accent either male or female
similar to M in the Bond films rather than this bimbo who would be perfect on
the set of Playschool. And having to listen to her updates every so often was
still draining but anyway. As well as the Deck of 52 you also do various other
mission for each faction sometimes attacking another faction that you were
previously working for resulting in your standing to drop with them. The
Chinese and South Koreans were the biggest enemies with the Russian Mafia
antagonising both and the Allied Forces being enemies with no-one except the
North Koreans of course which were permanently hostile.
The game intro was partly made of real-life footage
The game world is basically set up as a sandbox where you start
at the Allied M.A.S.H, this is your default starting area for the game and also
the place you end up when you die. From there you can basically go anywhere,
“commandeer” a vehicle and go visit any of the 4 factions, search for the
number cards or collectibles such as the national treasures, or just cause
destruction such as destroying North Korean Monuments, South Korean listening
posts or just random mayhem. One of the favourite things my friend Brok used to
do was come across a group of NPC’s from any particular faction fighting and
basically watched the action unfold, often with hilarious circumstances as this
unpredictability makes up the beauty of the game. Some faction missions
involved going after number and royal cards themselves though most show up as
emails on your PDA which
hint of their locations and you go and search for them. There are also some
“Car challenges” represented as dollar signs on the map that you can enter and
race to a particular area though most of the time I didn’t want to go wherever
it went.
You're just driving along then all of a sudden you come across a heated battle
Your PDA
(Personal Digital Assistant) is basically your access to intelligence and
support during the game featuring different screens including a map, your email
inboxes, the Merchant
of Menace shop which is provided by the Russian Mafia selling everything
from guns, to vehicles to airstrikes. There is also screen which has four
sections involving Deck of 52, bounties you have found such as Monuments,
WMD blueprints, National Treasures and South
Korean listening posts, and statistics of all the things you have done,
such as soldiers killed, distance travelled, favourite choice of vehicle and
other information about their exploits and a screen which shows the players
diplomatic stance with the various factions. You gain this and two other generic
weapons including an Assault Rifle and M67 Frag Grenade before driving backwards
out of a low flying plane into North Korea’s southern province which provides
the theatre of war for the first half of the game. So basically my goal was to
just finished the game, being the first time I wasn’t going to go for %100 completion,
it looked pretty good fun, sort of like a military version of GTA.
Your PDA screen showing you diplomatic stance
Unfortunately when I first started playing the game there
was one major issue, as I’ve probably mentioned before I don’t play any first
or third person shooters on console anymore with the exception of Red Dead
Redemption which had the lock-on feature most of the time but still got
annoying in the parts where you didn’t even if they were few. In Mercenaries
you don’t have the lock-on feature at all and it makes aiming and shooting and
general movement somewhat difficult and annoying when you are trying to shoot
specific enemies. This was especially annoying when trying to use a sniper
rifle and set aim on atarget but I
couldn’t get the thumbstick to line up as the feedback made it move too far to
one side or not far enough and this was even worse if you were under fire at
the time, I often had to resort to firing the sniper rifle from the hip which
was actually pretty effective with practice. Strafing while firing
also took some practice too
Daring frontal assault on a roadblock
This led to me delving into the realm of PS2 emulation again
which I had previously been unsuccessful at, I thought that If I could get the
emulator to work I could then be able to configure the controls to aim with my
mouse but unfortunately I could not get the game working properly. It had a
setting to use either the system memory or video memory and every time I had it
on system memory the screen would go all white with some sort of bloom issue and
on the video memory it worked but had massive slowdown especially when there
were a lot of particles (like dust) I made a video of my attempt to play the
game like this and it’s pretty damn hilarious.
My attempt to emulate the game, it ran a leeetle bit slow XD
The other problem was in cars the button for accelerating was
the X button and it was the same for reloading while on foot, so I couldn’t use
the W key for example to both walk forward and accelerate in vehicles. So I
don’t think I’m ever going to try and emulate PS2 anymore it just never works
properly which is a shame cause there’s a heap of games on PS2 I’d like to get
going via emulator to see what they look like. Failing this almost made me
refuse to play the game altogether but I decided to soldier on (literally, or
maybe mercenary on) and continue with the game, and I admit even with this flaw
it was still pretty good. I did dabble at first with an invincibility cheat
from the action replay but stopped using it when I realised it affected
vehicles too, so from then on it was gung-ho going the way it was meant to be
played… mostly.
It’s hard to a judge a game that was made in 2005 by today’s
standards but I’ve got to admit the gameplay was pretty good, even with my old
worn out PS2 controllers and the slightly jerky gameplay and having to move and
aim using the joysticks, I found that Jennifer the character I chose to play as
moved quite fast, probably the fastest of the three. I did have a bit of
trouble learning the controls as they were more complicated than most of the
PS2 games I used to play, you can jump and reload of course, and melee using
bash, which is one of the most important abilities I feel as unless you use a
stun grenade it’s the only way to stun a number card in order to perform a
takedown and handcuff them. There’s the action button which is mostly used to
get in and out of vehicles, there’s the L1 and L2 button which are used to
throw/select grenades which I managed to muck up under pressure several times
and then there was the R1 and R2 button which was used to fire your current
weapon or switch between them. The L3 and R3 buttons were for crouching and
using binoculars/weapon scope and the DPAD had a variety of functions.
This guy's gonna get it
Pressing up and down on the D-pad cycled through you support
options, these were often the difference between failing and completing a
mission depending on the difficulty. Support options include supplies such as
health, ammo, repair kit and weapons, vehicles inc jeeps, trucks and even tanks
and helicopters further into the game, and finally artillery and airstrikes
which were great fun to use. You obtained most of these when starting a mission
as they were given free of charge or cost a certain amount but could pick them
up on your travels or unlock them through completing the main game or various
challenges. The most important support item is the extraction beacon as this is
used to evacuate your subdued number cards. I found entirely by coincidence
that you get credit for capturing the number card alive as soon as you get them
on the chopper, if it is destroyed after it takes off you still get credit you
just lose money for the destroyed support chopper this led to me being very
sloppy and calling the chopper into some very dangerously hot areas though
funnily enough it never got destroyed by the enemy on the way in just on the
way out, I guess they just allow this so you can get credit for getting the
number card in alive. Another problem I had was that bashing an enemy once
stunned them bashing them while they are stunned kills them which led to me
accidentally killing a number card on several occasions.
I swear getting them on the chopper was a huge relief most of the time.
Other common support items are the Medivac which sends a
helicopter to take you back to the Allied M.A.S.H the mash is always your
starting point when you load the game after having saved and it always has some
jeeps and soldiers around to start you off again, this is also where you can
change your outfit when you acquire new ones. Another item that you pretty much
always have access to is C4, C4 is always useful for blowing up stuff provided
you can get close enough to set it and works on pretty much anything. Most of
the time I only brought in heavy vehicles and airstrikes when there was just
too much military presence to deal with or too many things to blow up with C4
though it made things difficult when a number card was in the thick of it
leading to me to decide it was just too hard to get bring them in alive and
carpet bombing the area was the simpler solution. I must admit It was only the
extra money that made we want to bring them in alive (you only got half the
bounty for them being dead) it was pretty much always the easier option to
shoot them or blow them up from afar but of course you want to strive for that
record as every time to jail or finish off anumber card it is reported on the number card screen of the PDA.
A video showing some of the airstrikes and vehicles you can purchase from the Merchant of Menace shop. This player is using the unlockable North Korean Elite model
Pushing left on the D-pad toggles the flags above friendly
and enemy soldiers heads allowing you to easily see which faction they are from
which is useful in a few cases. Soldiers which have a flag on their heads
permanently are officers who have the special ability of seeing through your
disguise. You “disguise” as I put it is one of the most powerful and useful
ability in the game I think, cannot count the number of times I used it.
Basically when you get into a north Korean vehicle out of view of any NK
soldiers or any kind of officers it shortly flags you as “disguised as North
Korean” and you are able to travel safely among them without fear of being
attacked, you can also do this in a civilian vehicle as the North Korean Army
will not attack civilians seemingly no matter where they drive. This feature is
obviously very powerful when used properly though there are a few things I
could nitpick like I’m driving around in a jeep with no doors and windows and
I’m still disguised apparently, and if I’m in a fully enclosed tank somehow
officers can still spot me. And how can civilians drive almost anywhere they
want, I swear I drove a civilian car into that many fortified military bases
and even crashed into a tank at one point but still my disguise was safe.
I'm a civilian news reporter! yes really. In case you didn't know these journalist trucks were regularly parked inside the M.A.S.H and you could listen to the news reports of what you had accomplished.
Playing the game felt relatively ok once I got used to the
controls and it did take me awhile as I had to have the instruction book open
sitting there so I could refer to it, but once I got that down it was all good.
The vehicles were quite fun to use with the ability to honk your horn to load
up your vehicle with friendly soldiers and with three different options for
example you could exit by yourself with everyone still inside, command everyone
else to exit or everyone gets out at once which was really helpful especially
when you were driving into the danger zone and wanted some cover for when you
got out though often I just led my allies to their untimely deaths which is why
I was glad the word doesn’t spread around and others refuse to get in for the
next mission.
Having allies in your vehicle is helpful as they can attack
enemies with the mounted guns available, Brok quickly pointed out that a
certain type of the South Korean Jeeps had a rocket launcher mounted on the
back and had unlimited ammo when used by an npc, this really came in handy and
was a hell of a laugh when I was driving along and watching the trigger happy
npc obliterate any North Korean vehicle that I drove past. The vehicles handle
pretty damn tightly, those jeeps I swear have uncanny handling, I was driving
like a bat out of hell and could still take corners like I was stuck to the
road whereas if this was any kind of realistic car game I would have been
wrapped around a tree long ago. Tanks and helicopters were easy enough to drive
(and fly) apart from the joystick aiming difficulty of course, I must have
driven dozens of tanks and heavy vehicles over the most ridiculous of terrain
and used helicopters numerous times to try and speed up a mission or just make
it easier. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t but it was all part of
the fun in Mercenaries.
Hold the line friends!
Accepting contracts and capturing or killing number cards is
the main part of the game obviously, the missions ranged from destroying an
enemy base to escorting or rescuing VIPs and even delivering a sports car to
the docks. The different factions often plot against each other and many
missions involve attacking another faction which is currently friendly to you, so it helped to do all one factions missions
in a row though they generally increase in difficulty as you go on. If I had previously completed a mission that involved antagonising a faction and they could change to unfriendly or hostile and would attack on site. I had to somehow make a furious dash into their base and then go to the guard outside the HQ and give him a bribe of a certain amount so I could start receiving missions from that faction again.
Oops wrong tower
Entering
faction bases involve going up to a soldier outside the HQ and then you can go
into the building/tent etc, the faction leaders themselves are generally quite
funny to listen to especially if you walk around while they are talking. I noticed that they voiced their displeasure if you had previously completed a mission from another faction that involved attacking them. One
neat thing I noticed was that Jennifer could understand what the Chinese were
saying when they spoke in their native language. After a mission is passed you
usually get a message of the whereabouts of another number card which can
actually be found randomly on the map even if you don’t have the message, most
of the royal cards are included in missions for the factions but some are also
found on the map.
"Well
if it isn't the Mercenary who destroyed my tanks and killed my men, well that money
helped so I'll instantly forget about it, here's some more missions. Oh and did you know you can press the Triangle button to STAND UP?"
Working through the Deck of 52 is obviously a long process
as I took three breaks from the game while playing as it took a lot of playtime
to get through, sometimes when trying to finish a hard mission I only got that
done for the entire play session for one night. Capturing or killing a card can be as easy or as hard as
you make it, often I tried going in with just what I had but obviously the more
you spend on extra vehicles, supplies and aerial support the easier it is. I’ve
had some trying times, losing cards to trigger happy allies, wayward bullets or
explosions, poorly aimed tank shells or airstrikes, one of the most common ways
I fudged it up at early game was accidentally smacking them twice killing them.
Of course once you do have them captured and cuffed it doesn’t end there,
getting the chopper down safely requires either escaping the area or ridding it
of enemy presence, and even then you need to find a reasonably flat spot so the
chopper can land, man the amount of times I saw that freakin “landing zone not
clear” warning was hella annoying, I’ve even gotten impatient and sloppy at
times and ended up getting credit for the capture then seeing the evac copter
blown to bits because I hadn’t made the area secure. Going After the Aces is an
entirely different kettle of fish as when you start an Ace contract you are
helicoptered to a different location as the Ace’s have their own area which
count as one big mission.
Gotcha!
I was impressed with the amount of weaponry and vehicles and
general resources available in the game, you’re able to carry a primary and
secondary weapon, most of the time I had an automatic weapon such as an M4 in
the first slot and an RPG or Sniper Rifle in the second and man did I have times
where I wished I had one or the other, at least at times when I had the sniper
rifle I usually had C4 to use. I spent most of my time purchasing jeeps and
helicopters from the Merchant of Menace as I often found tanks or knew where
the friendly factions kept theirs but man those airstrikes were oh so fun to
use, the smaller ones like the surgical strike were great for blowing up things
such as tanks while the larger strikes were for when you were just like screw
it I’m, just gonna blow everything to the moon. The way these were called in
varied, the airstrikes were usually way of satellite or ground laser. With the
satellite strikes you took control of a birds eye view camera to pinpoint the
location and were very accurate, the ground laser was done by a vertical laser
aimed from your location that you had to make sure that nothing was in that way
to block where you were pointing. The artillery strikes however had a very
dangerous way of marking as they were done by throwing a beacon onto the ground,
and did I mention that you couldn’t throw particularly far and after that
beacon was thrown you had to get the fack out of there fast as it didn’t take
long for the bombs to start falling, I hardly used artillery because of this.
Calling in a surgical strike via ground laser.
The size of the map in mercenaries was fairly impressive,
there was heaps to explore intentionally or unintentionally. Mercenaries is a
true sandbox in a way that there’s so much stuff happening around you, more so
then Red dead redemption and GTA for example as in those games the random
events seem to revolve around you, but in this game it seems you’re just
driving along and you all of a sudden drive into a full on pitched battle
between two factions with tanks and everything, sometimes I just screamed and
got the hell out of there as fast as I could, this was usually when I was on a
difficult mission and didn’t want to die, but other times listening to the
recommendation from Brok I just sat at a safe distance and watched the carnage
unfold and it was lots of fun to see out, who’s going to win? etc There are
places on the map that are permanently under control of one faction and you are
attacked no matter what you’re standing with them, there are places on the map
which seem to be constantly besieged by conflict, and then there are the edges
of the map where if you stray too far are identified as a deserter and are
bombed by allied planes. Goddamn that was annoying as it was usually by
accident and I was all like “Wait sorry, NO I’LL GO BACK NNONONONONONO AAAHHH!
‘BOOM!’ resulting in afailed mission.
Random things happen on missions too, mostly scripted but they are still good,
like when I was delivering that sports car for the Russians, you’d think it’d
be easy but no the game throws everything under the sun to try and block your
path and there’s also a lot of random funny things happening like npcs crashing
helicopters and falling from the sky.
Oops that wasn't supposed to happen
Regarding the collectibles Brok had to continually remind me
to look for them as sometimes I was just so intent upon completing the missions
I didn’t think of it, I ended up collecting a few though, enough to unlock some
extra features like new weapons and supply drops and the ability to use other
characters models such as Agent Buford of the South Koreans and even Indiana
Jones for some reason. Had a lot of fun with that and also destroying the
statues was pretty fun. Sorry if I spoil it but for those who don’t know it
there are actually two maps, you start off in the relatively warmer southern province with more vegetation and then after the first two Ace contracts you move
to the colder more snowy northern province. The map change doesn’t change too much,
just continues the story with new missions in a different environment and the
bases are all in different spots to change things up a little, also there seems
to be a bit more warfare happening then the last map and of course more
collectibles to er, collect.
Your PDA showing part of the Southern Province, you can see the South Korean base on the map.
The Ace contracts as I said before are each set in
entirely different instance on islands away from the main map, I was impressed
by the scenarios as they had some pretty impressive moments which I’ll
describe. In the Ace of Diamonds contract I was running through the jungle then
the a nearby car exploded and I was ambushed by covert jungle marines in
camouflage and at the end of the mission I had to blow up the base as it was
the only way to kill the Ace and a crane actually landed on him. Another moment
was when I was doing the ace of Hearts contract and had to fight through all
these enemies around cargo crates until from watching a video I realised I
could just summon an enemy jeep, put on a disguise and drive all the way to the
end bit, several moments like that got me shaking my head at the way you could
make things indefinitely easier with just a small change.
The Ace of Diamonds mission done on Xbox360, which features the covert jungle marine ambush i mentioned, though this player manages to get the Ace of Diamonds out alive even with enemy soldiers and tanks shooting at him no less, whereas I just blew up the base with him in it.. Interestingly enough someone made a comment on the video saying "The cheat way is to clear that base first, where the ace will appear.
Then go up and destroy the supergun, then you find the ace on his own" *facepalm* wish I'd thought of that.
The graphics in the game obviously look dated by today’s
standards, but it looked pretty damn good for a game made in 2005 as when the
PS2 was released the industry thankfully had gotten over that awful transition
to full 3D phase in the late nineties and early 2000’s, sure textures were muddy
and the view was blurry and hard to see into the distance but it was
workable.I didn’t have too many qualms
with the interface, the icons were relatively easy to see and things such as
circles which showed you where to get into vehicles which really helped. The
game’s graphics were fine not much more to say, I liked the little details like
the soldiers milling around in the faction bases and things like the miniature
map of the area in the Chinese base and some of the explosions were pretty
spectacular with almost no slowdown.
Good time to leave I think
The sound and music was pretty good, the
soundtrack at the start was quite memorable and the sound effects were spot on
apart from a few annoying voice actors and some acting in parts. I swear
there’s this bit in the final Ace Contract the Ace of Spades General Song who
I’ll add is fleeing with the codes for the country’s nuclear arsenal and a
captive you’ve saved says “you must stop him!” and she’s like “stop who?” and
I’m like “fackin General Song the Ace of Spades you dumb bitch! who do you
think?” and then the guy is like “he has the codes” and she’s like “the launch
codes?” Fuaaaarrrr! but yeh anyway otherwise it was fun to listen to. The
troopers themselves yelled different things and the allied were the funniest
obviously being in English telling you to get moving before they were even in
the vehicle and other things like “let’s see what this tin can can do”.
"Stop Who?"
Despite my issues with the game is was enjoyable overall,
sure there was the stick aiming using my slightly worn controllers, the
confusion of which button to press resulting in me flailing around, the sometimes
muddy graphics making long range sniping difficult and the fact that I just don’t
think I could go through that again for fun. Despite all this the game damn fun
and entertaining enough as Brok sat down with me to watch almost every session
I did, this was the beauty of this particular game, as if he was watching me
play Star Wars the Old Republic for instance he’d probably be bored shitless. Having
him there helped a lot though, having played the game through before had a lot
of advice which helped immensely, I never thought how useful it was to have someone
watch you play as they saw and suggested things that you would never think
about.
On to plan B!
A sequel Mercenaries
2: World in Flames was created in 2008 though Brok claimed that it was not
nearly as good apart from the upgraded graphics. I was talking to Brok about
the ideal situation where Mercenaries Playground of Destruction was remade on
PC with full mouse and keyboard support and how awesome that would be, if this
actually happened I would be ecstatic and would definitely try go through it
again and would place it in a much higher regard then I already do. Though we
can dream can’t we?
