Playing A Game Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction PS2

Imagine GTA3 set in North Korea - instead of rival gangs vying for control of a city, you have rival governments vying for control of a battlefield. This is Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction, and it's basically just as fun as it sounds.

As a mercenary (you can choose between three merc characters, each with a unique special ability), your ultimate goal is to capture or kill General Song, who's taken over North Korea in a military coup and threatens the world with nuclear arms. But to get to him, you'll need some intel; and to gather it, you'll need to work with the armed forces already set up around Pyongyang.

Your merc can play the field between the Allied Nations, South Korea, China, and the Russian Mafia in order to get closer to Song. Meanwhile you'll be capturing various other North Korean big-wigs from the Deck of 52, each one assigned a playing card 'rank' according to importance - and hence, bounty. Your cash reserve (from completing contracts as well as from Deck captures and kills) features prominently in the on-screen HUD, serving not only as a sort of score, but also as a resource for support items like C4 and air-drops.

It's a great premise that's great fun to play out, and really benefits from some smart world design: the game map is small and dense, so finding a new mission is always super-easy. The big fly in the ointment, though, is controls - they are pretty terrible. Several button-map conventions are illogically changed (Circle button to jump? Really?), moving at any speed slower than a full run is all but impossible, and there's no good setting for aiming sensitivity, which is almost as bad as Dead Rising's.

I'm getting used to the controls, though. And while a single mercenary waging war on North Korea isn't the most realistic of settings, the game world is impressively immersive, due in large part to some great voice acting (awful fake accents notwithstanding) and a sweeping orchestral score, LucasArts-style.

Plus, there is an unlockable cheat to play as Han Solo. Fuck yes!

Progress: Captured the Jack of Clubs

Rating: Good