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.1 031
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.
Resident Evil 3: NemesisResident Evil 3: Nemesis is a survival horror video game and the third installment in the Resident Evil series. Like its two predecessors, it is a third-person action-adventure game with polygonal characters on pre-rendered backgrounds with cinematic camera angles. Although the game uses the same basic engine and gameplay as the previous games, the gameplay is improved by features such as auto-targeting, a 180 degree spin, and a new dodge move that allows Jill to avoid enemy attacks. The PC and Dreamcast versions includes all eight of Jill's possible costumes, as well as the mercenary mini-game Operation Mad Jackal which allows you to play as one of the three Umbrella soldiers. On the Playstation version, these special features must be unlocked by beating the game with a high score.Action Horror Survival
The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher BayEscape from Butcher Bay is set in the futuristic science fiction universe of the Chronicles of Riddick franchise, and is a prequel to the film Pitch Black. The game takes place inside Butcher Bay, a maximum-security prison from which no prisoner has escaped. The facility - constructed on a barren planet - contains three increasingly secure holding areas, and a subterranean mining operation.Action Science fiction Stealth
Grand Theft AutoDrive dozens of varied vehicles around three of America's toughest cities.
Only the best will be able to tame the fastest cars. Only the smartest will know all the short-cuts and the whereabouts of the hottest wheels.
Only the toughest will be able to take on the world and finish the job like a professional...Open world Action Sandbox
The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark AthenaThe Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena is a new, action stealth first person shooter set in the rich, futuristic, sci-fi world of the Riddick film saga. The game features a rich storyline, intriguing, developed characters, and the voice acting of Vin Diesel.
The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena follows up the story from the original game title as Riddick must now flee the Dark Athena, following his harrowing escape from the notorious Butcher Bay prison. During the adventure, Richard B. Riddick must escape the predatory Merc-ship Dark Athena using stealth and action to overcome its merciless crew and challenge the nefarious Captain Revas.Action Science fiction Stealth
Duke Nukem 3D: 20th Anniversary World TourFrag like it’s 1996 – this time with even more asses to kick! Join the world’s greatest action hero in Duke Nukem 3D: 20th Anniversary World Tour as he saves Earth once again, kicking alien ass and saving babes across the globe along the way.Action Comedy Science fiction
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
MechWarrior 2: 31st Century CombatYou are the genetically engineered Clan Mechwarrior. The Clans are invading the Inner Sphere. Join either the Wolf Clan or the Jade Falcon Clan as they pursue their own agenda against the Inner Sphere and other Clans. Take your advanced Omnimechs into battle against all comers. Win high warrior ratings (by using less mechs or smaller mechs than needed, completing secondary objectives, etc.) and you'll get chance at a promotion trial where you face superior odds in an arena. If you win, you advance in rank. If you are very successfully, you can make it all the way up to Khan, leader of the Clan!
Mechwarrior II was developed in-house by Activision as the successor to their original Mechwarrior. While this time there are no dynamic campaign and mercenary actions, the Clan culture is integrated into the two campaigns. Different clans have different mechs and different rules, even different weapons. You can customize your mechs in order to use less than the "par" force in order to get a higher rating. The full 3D environment wasn't pretty as this was before the 3D accelerators made their debut, but it's still better than anything that came before. Let addition of NetMech allowed users to fight each other online. When 3D cards came along, special versions were created to take advantage of 3D texturing. While not QUITE as replayable as Mechwarrior, it's nonetheless a classic.
If you want them now, get the Titanium Edition, which is 3D accelerated.Action Science fiction
Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Chaos TheoryYou are Sam Fisher, the NSA's most elite black-ops agent. To achieve your mission you will kill from close range, attack with your combat knife, shoot with the prototype Land Warrior rifle, and use radical suppression techniques such as the inverted neck break. Also take on cooperative multiplayer infiltration missions, where teamwork is the ultimate weapon.Action Stealth
MechWarrior 4: VengeanceMechWarrior 4: Vengeance is a computer game developed by FASA Interactive and published by Microsoft. It was released on November 22, 2000. This game is the fourth game in MechWarrior series. It takes place in BattleTech universe where the pinnacle of all war machines are huge, heavily armed robots called BattleMechs. The player pilots one of these "'Mechs" and uses variety of available weapons (autocannons, lasers, missiles, and more) to battle enemy 'Mechs, tanks and other vehicles. An expansion pack, MechWarrior 4: Black Knight, was released in 2001, and a subsequent stand-alone expansion, MechWarrior 4: Mercenaries, was released on November 7, 2002.Action Science fiction
Red Dead Redemption: Game of the Year EditionRed Dead Redemption: Game of the Year Edition will include the full, original Red Dead Redemption game plus all free and paid downloadable content packs released to date, including the wildly popular Undead Nightmare single and multiplayer offerings, as well as all DLC originally released as pre-order content.Sandbox