HALL OF SHAME: Mercenaries

February 13, 2006

I thought I would never put another game under my hall of shame list, but I guess I was wrong. Mercenaries is the next victim to the hall of shame. Another fine example of how having an open world in a game is not always a good thing.

Mercenaries is one of those games where if you maybe play it once in a while... lets say... once a month or something, it is very fun. Blow the shit out of anything and cause as much havoc as your bank account lets you. However, we you try to play this game once a day, you quickly find that this gets very boring. As fun as it is to roll up in a tank just after a massive bombing run, after about the 100th time, it left me with, "Ok... what else is there to do?" Blowing up shit isn't as much fun when you can do it anytime you want. GTA can get away with it because you don't have a huge ass army backing you up, and you need to earn that rocket launcher or whatever. With Mercenaries, don't have the weapon/car/helicopter/bomb you want? Hell just call up and it at your feat in 5 seconds. Rather than making you work for the huge payoff in a game, you let the game basically take care of that for you. It may work for others, but when you don't feel rewarded for blowing something up, or getting an item, it gets very boring, very quickly.

Another gripe I have with this game is just the massive amounts of driving you have to do. Most of your time is just sitting in a damn car driving past dull landscape with no action in between. Again, GTA can get away with this, because there is always something going on in the city. With Mercenaries, you spend maybe 15 minutes driving to get to a mission contact, and then another 15 minutes driving to where the mission is. Ummm yeah..... pass.

I don't know if I was just spoiled by the end of the year awesome games (God of War, DMC3, RE4, etc.) or what, but I was really let down with Mercenaries. Lucas Arts... god damn it... either stick with click adventure games, or funny games, or don't make anything at all. A pipedream, yes, but some day... Lucas Arts will be back at the level where every one loved them and every game was solid gold.