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.1 183
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!
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.
@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).
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.
Call of Juarez: The CartelEmbark on a bloody journey from Los Angeles to Juarez as lawlessness of the Old West is brought to the present. Welcome to the new Wild West.Action Stealth
Crimson SkiesThe series is set within an alternate history of the 1930s invented by Weisman and McCoy. Within this divergent timeline, the United States has collapsed, and air travel has become the most popular mode of transportation in North America; as a result, air pirates thrive in the world of Crimson Skies. In describing the concept of Crimson Skies, Jordan Weisman stated he wanted to "take the idea of 16th century Caribbean piracy and translate into a 1930s American setting."Action Fantasy Historical Warfare
Red Dead RedemptionA bundle containing ports of Red Dead Redemption and the Undead Nightmare expansion missing multiplayer components and including some parts of the GOTY release.Open world Action Sandbox
Contraband PoliceTake over the duties of a border guard inspector in a communist country of the 80's. Smuggling, corruption and forgery are the order of the day here. Be vigilant and earn the respect of your superiors.Action
Midway Arcade Treasures 2Midway Arcade Treasures 2 is the second collection of classic arcade games published by Midway for the GameCube, PlayStation 2, and Xbox. This compilation includes 20 games that were not in the 2003 release of Midway Arcade Treasures or the 2005 release of Midway Arcade Treasures 3.
The game plays similar on all three consoles, though the Xbox version has the exclusive ability to upload scores to an online scoreboard. The Xbox version, however, is not compatible with the Xbox 360. The special features on each version of the game are the same. These include game histories, developer interviews, and other documents.Action
Power Dolls 6Power Dolls 6 changes the dynamic up by being the series first real-time action game.Science fiction
MechWarrior 4: MercenariesThe sequel to Mechwarrior 4: Vengeance. When you're a 'Mech Mercenary, you call the shots. You don't fight for honor - you fight for cold hard cash, a fierce reputation, and the heart-pounding thrill of the kill. Your allegiance goes to the highest bidder. You answer only to the call of fortune. Your fate is in your hands alone. Select from 4 of the most notorious mercenary units, Kell Hounds, Wolf's Dragoons, Northwind Highlanders, and Gray Death Legion, to alter your missions, with different outcomes based on your victories. Choose from over 35 different 'Mechs, including 10 new ones. And for the first time ever, your secondary lance allows you to muster 8 'Mechs into battle simultaneously. Or make a killing in the infamous Solaris VII arenas, where fighting dirty can make you filthy rich. Includes 'Mechs from the Black Knight expansion for Mechwarrior 4, and is fully compatible with Mechwarrior 4 'Mech Packs. Fight for fame. Fight for fortune. Fight as a Mech Mercenary!Action Warfare Science fiction
Risk of Rain 2The classic multiplayer roguelike, Risk of Rain, returns with an extra dimension and more challenging action. No run will ever be the same with randomized stages, enemies, bosses, and items. Play solo, or team up with up to four friends to fight your way through hordes of monsters, unlock new loot, and find a way to escape the planet.Action Science fiction Survival
Doom EternalDeveloped by id Software, DOOM Eternal is the direct sequel to DOOM (2016). Experience the ultimate combination of speed and power with the next leap in push-forward, first-person combat.
As the DOOM Slayer, return to take your vengeance against the forces of Hell. Set to an all-new pulse pounding soundtrack composed by Mick Gordon, fight across dimensions as you slay new and classic demons with powerful new weapons and abilities.Action Fantasy Horror Warfare Science fiction
FreelancerEight hundred years prior to the start of our story, bitter conflict divided all of mankind. A handful of colonists struck out on their own to begin anew - far away from the Earth and its turmoil. Several ships were launched with enough equipment and supplies to give the hundreds onboard a fighting chance - but since the area around far-off Sirius had never been surveyed, no one really knew what to expect. What they found was a new frontier of free-flowing natural resources, unexplored territories, great wonders and lurking dangers. Each ship, representing the clusters of people and their earthly place of origin, settled into different parts of the galaxy pre-selected by their ship-board computer to give them the best chance of survival.
Life was hard in the beginning, but over the 800 years the different colonies prospered and expanded their territories, claiming more and more systems for their own. Survival and propagation eventually led to growth and profit as each of the colonies developed specialties and fostered commerce. As the colonies grew and time passed their connections with their roots on Earth dwindled and they lost their memories of the conflicts of the past. Soon their attention was dominated by new, more immediate conflicts. Feelings of lost ancestral connection spurred anachronism in the look of the great cities, and created a somewhat distorted image of each colony's cultural heritage. In the ever-expanding outer edge of the territories, frontier lawlessness prevailed.
The Houses: Each shipboard colony that left Earth carried some memory of its origins in its name. The Liberty carried Americans, The Bretonia flew from The United Kingdom and surrounding territory, The Kusari from Asia, and the Rheinland launched with Germanic cargo.
As each ship settled and colonies began to expand, they knew little about each other and their advancing development. Finally, little by little, the individual colonies found each other and began to set up trade routes to link their systems for commerce and solidarity.
Today, with each colony firmly rooted in its respective corner of the galaxy, the colonies rely heavily on each other for trade and industry but also compete for resources and new territories in the Border Worlds. The colonies mandate member governments in "The New Alliance" within the Sirius sector. To control conflicts, each colony has forged alliances and treaties with others as they have grown. Competition remains fierce, however. Struggles rage for supremacy in business, commerce, resources, power and control. There can be tenuous peace between colonies' political agendas, but the grabs for holdings constantly unsettle the volatile frontier.Our Pick Top Trending Science fiction Sandbox