Mercenaries Updated Hands-On Impressions - The Early Levels

LucasArts producer Chris Susen explains what you can expect from Mercenaries. Double-click on the video window for a full-screen view.

At a recent LucasArts press event, we had the opportunity to get our hands on Mercenaries, the upcoming shooter from developer Pandemic and publisher LucasArts. The game will let you play as one of three different soldiers of fortune and undertake missions for one of four different political factions. Your missions will take you to the North Korean demilitarized zone and will require you to capture or assassinate various targets of opportunity in a North Korean splinter faction that has seized control of the company. These missions will correspond to the 52 cards in a deck of playing cards, and high-priority targets, such as ministers and scientists, will rank as royalty cards like jacks, queens, and kings.

We had a chance to try out a few early missions in the game, which, other than giving you a primary objective (in the case of the early mission we played, blowing up a military base) and one or more secondary objectives (in this case, blowing up a nearby barracks), basically let you do whatever you want. Throughout Mercenaries, you'll carry a PDA portable computer that will contain your updated mission objectives (sent to you by e-mail), maps of the surrounding areas, and even a gateway to the online black market where you can purchase weapons and other aids, like air strikes and artillery strikes. Mission objectives are clearly marked on the minimap in the upper-right corner of the screen, but exactly how you perform them is up to you.

For instance, in the early mission we played, we began with a small fortune and access to an armored tank at a remote outpost patrolled by enemy soldiers. The most obvious way to proceed was simply to jump in the tank and bulldoze through the roadblocks that stood between us and our objective. Thanks to the heavy armor of the tank, we were able to simply grind right on through to the enemy base areas through enemy fire and unload the main turret on our targets. However, we were also able to hijack passing cars driven by the enemy, which afforded less protection but much faster movement. This didn't help us in getting past the roadblocks, but we were able to jump out and engage the enemy on foot, taking cover behind the vehicle. Mercenaries incorporates the Havok physics engine (which has previously appeared in games like Max Payne 2 and Far Cry) to physically model just about everything in the game, so even stopped vehicles provided cover, and explosions sent bodies and crates flying.

While Mercenaries unfortunately doesn't feature multiplayer support, its single-player game seems to have quite a bit of variety. Vehicles seem to handle in an intuitive, semirealistic manner--tanks don't take forever to turn, as they would in real life, but they are definitely less agile than smaller vehicles. The on-foot action also seems solid, and in several cases, genuinely challenging. Like every console shooter since Halo, the game uses the left thumbstick to move and the right thumbstick to aim your shots. The game's aiming scheme seems responsive enough to allow just enough error to let you quickly acquire targets and down hostiles with bursts from an M-16 assault rifle without making aiming entirely too easy.

Mercenaries seems to be coming along well for the PS2, even though the Xbox version is clearly better looking, since it doesn't have the PS2 version's jaggies and it has a slightly better frame rate. However, both games do seem to have healthy frame rates and they both control well, for the most part. If the game can succeed at everything it's attempting to do, Mercenaries will be an accessible shooter influenced by pseudo real-world international conflicts with plenty of gameplay depth. The game is scheduled to ship for both the Xbox and PS2 early next year.