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Additionally, should you start to reign fiery death upon a particular faction; their attitude towards you will change. Keep attacking and they’ll eventually consider you a threat, shooting you on sight. You can get back in their good graces by bribing them or performing certain good deeds like helping them win skirmishes. In the case of the South Koreans and Chinese, destroying monuments to Soong and finding scattered national treasures and WMDs will make you a good guy again.
Pandemic Studios has made a number of vehicles available for your use, from APCs and tanks, to helicopters and even civilian cars. All can be bought using the money you earn from completing each mission or from destroying North Korean vehicles. As you complete each faction’s tasks, more hardware will be made available for purchase and a simple order from the Russian Mafia’s Merchant of Menace online store results in immediate delivery. No wandering around, waiting for a car to come by here! In addition to vehicles, you can also order a number of supply drops and air strikes, which are essential to completing some missions. There is nothing like sending in a cruise missile strike or artillery bombardment to take the enemy down a notch, and nothing beats the bunker buster bomb for complete annihilation.
All this joyous turmoil is not without some problems. A few of the typical GTA-style glitches rear their ugly heads, such as poor collision detection. There’s also lots of fog to cover up the short draw distance. Considering that most of the play area is made up of empty mountains and plains, I was surprised to see this. Moreover, I had problems with voice overs occasionally cutting out and a sharp drop in overall sound when using helicopters. Most of these problems are minor and hardly detract from the game, though. A game of this size and style is bound to have a few hiccups now and then.
Pandemic also makes up for these problems through sheer presentation. Literally everything can be destroyed, and you’ll love the way vehicles explode into a thousand pieces, scarring the land they stood on. Taking down buildings is immensely fun (again, the bunker buster!) and blowing through enemy positions never gets old. Everything looks great and the two play maps are big enough to warrant extensive exploration. There’s just so much to do that you’ll spend well over 20 hours going through Mercenaries the first time. The game’s life span is greatly extended through the inclusion of mini games (like GTA’s vigilante and rampage mini games) to be completed.
You simply cannot go wrong with Mercenaries. An online component would have been nice (there’s a lesson to be learned here from Mech Assault 2) but this is a stellar effort all around from Pandemic Studios. Xbox owners looking to unload some tension have had their prescription filled in spades.
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