Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction (2005)
Genres:Shooter
Themes:Open world, Action, Stealth, Sandbox
Game modes:Single player
Story:During the last years of his reign, the North Korean president Choi Kim attempted a reconciliation with the country's southern neighbor, with the ultimate goal of reunification. However, his son, General Choi Song, and the military clique under his leadership, strongly disagreed with the old man's views. Eventually, Choi Song orchestrated his own father's assassination, took control of North Korea, and severed ties with the outside world.
Eventually, plans of a nuclear reactor construction began to surface. China, South Korea, the Allied Nations and even the Russian Mafia sent troops to North Korea, competing for power in the troubled region. A bounty of a hundred million dollars for General Song was declared. This is where the mercenaries enter the playfield.
Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction is a free-roaming war action and driving game with open-ended gameplay in a large world. The player can choose to control any of the three mercenary protagonists, each with their own strengths: North American Chris Jacobs can sustain higher damage; Jennifer Mui from Hong-Kong is proficient in stealth; Mattias Nilsson from Sweden can run faster than the others. Each of the mercenary also speaks different languages, which makes him or her more or less suitable for work with particular factions.
Players have free reign of a massive landscape to take bounties on the "Deck of 52", a list of most wanted criminals in North Korea, as well as a number of factions. Four factions have moved in to take advantage of the coup for personal gains; each faction will offer the player resources such as vehicles and supplies, as well as missions that the player can use to make money off of. If the player makes a faction happy, they will offer intel on the locations of various bounties from the deck.
Players have a vast array of resources available to them to get the job done. It is possible to commandeer tanks, choppers and and any other military hardware to blow up the game's destructible landscape across the North Korean countryside. Helping out various factions provides access to numerous vehicle drops, supply drops, and air strikes.Show more
Vote to bring this game to GOG and help preserve it.1 027
How is this not upvoted more?! Mercenaries was a game made by the legendary Pandemic Studios, which was responsible for the Destroy All Humans series and, of course, Star Wars: Battlefront I & II. It was even published by LucasArts! The premise and execution felt like a forerunner to the Just Cause series, which prioritized giving you a sandbox in which you could just go wild and destroy everything. One of the main claims to fame for Mercenaries, however, was that eventually you could just flat out destroy whole buildings with increasingly powerful weaponry. My friends had a blast (literally!) calling in airstrikes on random buildings. One of the great games to come out of Pandemic, and would be super-appealing to fans of Just Cause or Red Faction: Guerrilla. Never got to play the sequel, so I wouldn't mind both games coming to GOG one day!
@ChibaTriv basically said all there needs to be said. Absolute banger of early open world sand-box game design that crawled so Just Cause could fly (with a grappling hook and parachute).
This game pissed off the despotic dynasty terrorising North Korea for over half a century. Let's get this game a remaster to give them the finger once again.
Fully destructable enviroments.
Open world.
Call in air strikes, weapon drops or just have an atttack helicoptor, APC or tank dropped.
Need to balance faction reputation to get access to all missions and equipment.
You have to remember how long ago this was. 2005.
Yet this game had freedom, building destruction, stealth and superb action elements. It's like GTA, but with a hard focus on destruction and it was so incredibly fun playing this. It was novel too, being able to play as a young female Chinese operative or even a Swedish mercenary. I would adore having access to this game again, as it's really really underserved.
I never understood why Mercenaries wasn't more popular. It was fun picking up VIPs, knocking out guards and just feeling FREE to do things. Features such as being able to order airstrikes and all kinds of vehicles, wasn't even very common in games back then, if memory serves. But look now at the latest Metal Gear Solid game for example, where such features are a mainstay. What more could you want in a 2005 game? It really WAS a Playground of Destruction!
I used to play it when I was a kid, when I still bought video game magazines. One day I saw a picture of this game on the cover and the destructible environment. I fell in love and in the meantime I recovered the first chapter, definitively falling in love with the saga.
I’ve played Mercenaries since it came out, spending hundreds if not thousands of hours as a kid exploring the world, messing around, finding every fun little detail and generally causing chaos.
I’ve never since played a game where you could load up a vehicle with random allies, drive to an existing battle and help them completely turn the tide just for the hell of it, or where you can use a helicopter which to send vehicles flying, and have them actually explode on impact like you’d expect, let alone have an ingame minigame dedicated to it.
Want to attach a random civilian’s car to a crane 70 meters in the air? Go for it, driver and all!
Carpet bomb an enemy encampment? Watch as everything is reduced to rubble.
Role play saving the downed pilots on the enemy’s island used for chemical weapon testing, spending ages stealing a hardened vehicle with enough carrying capacity as you scout the whole island to find and save every last one, and then conveniently look away as the cutscene plays of you getting on the evacuation helicopter and leaving without them? Oddly specific but by god can you do it.
Returning to the game years later, I was able to find a community of fans who loved it just as much as I did, and over the years helped grow that community by orders of magnitude, even introducing new people to the series who’ve fallen in love with it.
We’ve even done a Q&A with the devs to learn more about the development process of Mercenaries and the love they poured into it.
This is a game that deserves to be preserved on GOG. It’s an opportunity for people who haven’t played it since their childhood to rediscover it, and for people who never got a chance to play it in the first place to finally find and experience it.
One of the best open world desrtuction games ever made. I literally would do anything to have this remastered in 4k and able to share with my friends. PLEASEEEEEE
Mercenaries is perhaps one of the most atmospheric and best sandbox-driven open world games from the 6th generation console era with unparalelled destruction for the time; there is nothing else like it. Mercenaries features extremely unique and satisfying gameplay systems all backed by a phenomenal soundtrack by Chris Tilton and Michael Giacchino.
Mercenaries is a game I always find myself coming back to even after nearly 20 years accompanied by a lot of fond memories from my childhood and I would love nothing more to see it properly preserved on PC.
It's still one of the best games of all time for me, I don't think there's anything else like it, there's games that come close, but no cigar. Even the Sequel failed to capture the magic of the first game. I'd love to see them polish this game and re-release it. Hell I'd love Mercenaries 3. Pandemic was a top tier Studio.
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