Mercenaries: Guns, Money, Missiles, and Immersive Sims
Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction afforded me the chance to drive a red convertible through a bunker full of North Korean military personnel and then call in a cruise missile strike while slowly walking away, my cheat-code-protected avatar ignoring the bullets and RPG fire ricocheting off of his shoulders.
I miss cheat codes.
I know I’m performing a gross disservice to readers by offering a pithy “back in my day” attitude, but I’m tired of having to shell out 5 bucks for a DLC package that lets me miss 0.01% of bullet fire for the first hour of gameplay when 10 years ago all I had to do was move the D-pad up, down, left, and right a few times to become god.
I’ll grab my walker and see myself out.
Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction was released for the Playstation 2 and XBox on 10 January 2005 and, in no small measure, more or less kidnapped me for several years of play. Long after I had moved onto my Playstation 3 and began following the career of a small character by the name of Ezio Auditore da Firenze, I still found time to boot the game up on my Playstation 2 and shoot North Korean soldiers on a painfully low framerate. In fact even now owning a Playstation 5 with plenty of games to play, I still found an excuse to visit my parents and borrow my old Playstation 2 just so I could play the game.
And also finally play Silent Hill 2, but that’s for another essay.
The game follows three possible characters, but I always chose Mattias Nilsson the Swedish edge-lord who looks like he has moderator positions in at least three active white-supremacist subreddits, and who happens to be voiced by Peter Stormare. Working for a private security firm (mercenary operation (that’s where we get the title)) by the name of ExOps, our character is dropped into a conflict in the Korean Peninsula. There’s some attempt at providing a “narrative” to the game by showing us news-reels and informing us that the son of a North Korean despot has murdered his father, assumed control of the state, and is now invading South Korea. The game then gives us a list of bounties known as the “Deck of 52.” These men (and a few women, #feminism), are all accomplices to the the Ace of Spades a man by the name of….(*quick Google search*)...General Choi Song, who is leading the invasion. Capturing or killing them will guarantee financial reward, especially Song who is worth $100,000,000.
Mattias is then airdropped into the region in a machine-gun mounted hummer and told to head to the UN Allies base of operations.
From there, as Cole Porter sang, “Anything goes.”
Mercenaries was an open world game, and because of this was endlessly compared to Grand Theft Auto. And I’m not putting myself above anyone here; “It’s GTA but set in the Korean War” was the intellectual impression and elevator pitch that I would offer people who asked me why I liked the game.
Not that anyone ever did. Now that I think of it nobody ever really asked me what videogames I was playing. And honestly, I don’t think anyone does to this day either.
I’ll have to reflect on that.
But Mercenaries was also a collectathon, a role-playing-game(rpg), a third-person shooter(tps), and arguably an immersive Sim.
More on that in a second.
Somehow, with all of these great elements, and a fun story to boot, Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction didn’t impact the videogame market as much as it could have, and the series is unlikely to ever make a comeback.
I struggled with what to write here because this game for me has a lot of nostalgia connected to it and I don’t want to be yet another in a long line of dudes on the internet more or less killing other people’s time by writing another “thems were the days.”
Mercenaries had a lot of good ideas and structures that provided interesting gameplay, and while the story was often criticized for being flat, I guess I’m one of the few people who recognised that, well, yeah dude it’s supposed to be. Mercenaries was a goofy game about war that was trying to give the player a sandbox where they could freely play with the aesthetic of a military industrial complex with little to no consequences. In terms of the general narrative the game is basically an 80s action film, and the dialog of the protagonists sound like they were rejected lines from Commando.
Trying to approach Mercenaries from a “serious” perspective is just going to disappoint. Instead, I argue that if the player approaches the game as a free-for-all immersive sim, they’ll find very quickly why the game is as fun as it is.
So what is an immersive sim?
Immersive-Sims are, simply put, games that allow the player multiple options in how to solve problems, complete missions, and overcome obstacles.
Here’s an example straight from the game.
Within the world there are four factions fighting the North Koreans, each for their own motivations that are often, if we’re being honest, selfish. These are the “UN Allies” (which is basically the United States Army), the South Korean Army, the Russian Mafia, and the People’s Army of China. Each of these factions has their own agenda, and while the first missions from each of these factions seem genuinely concerned about defeating the North Koreans, the very next mission is going to be at the other’s expense. The second mission the Chinese army offers Mattias is titled, “No One Will Ever Know,” and the mission involves stealthily assassinating three Russian Mafia “officers” who the Chinese want dead. The player is given a crate outside of their headquarters which contains a sniper rifle.
It’s here though that the gameplay of Mercenaries comes full circle.
You don’t have to take the sniper rifle.
You don’t even have to be stealthy.
The goal that is given to the player is to kill these three officers, which means a player is given a wide berth to decide how they want to proceed. For example, they could take the sniper rifle, find a secluded spot, and kill the officers. But if the player doesn’t care about playing it stealthy then they could simply grab one of the nearby Chinese army vehicles, drive to the mission location, and open fire on the Russians in plain sight. This will ultimately hurt the “favor” the player may have established with that group, but I’ll have to save that for another essay. Likewise, depending on the weaponry the player has acquired they could kill these officers with a machine gun, a sawed off shotgun, or even an RPG. Heck, the player doesn’t even have to use guns, they could literally run the officer over with a car, or a truck, or a tank. They might even be able to locate a helicopter and machine-gun-fire the officer to death from above. I mentioned at the beginning of this essay that I often used cheat codes when playing Mercenaries; this affords players even more options. These cheats can provide the player with millions of dollars which in turn can be spent on air strikes and/or artillery fire. As such, if the player decides they want to avoid using handheld weapons or vehicles they could always purchase a missile strike which definitely blows up the Russian officers leaving them nothing more than piles of meat amongst the rubble. Or, finally, if none of these options are desired there is always the choice to simply beat an npc to death.
Choices like this are why I would argue that Mercenaries was as much an immersive sim as it was an adventure/shooter game. Rather than limit a player to follow a specific path, Mercenaries provided their character a “playground” of choices and toys to complete their destructive objective.
Oh wow. I just got the subtitle.
That’s funny.
Kinda.
Not really.
Moving on.
Mercenaries’ gameplay allows this liberty of exploration and action in virtually every level of its structure. While there are one or two missions the player will encounter that have limitations (there’s one mission where you have to ferry around a reporter and not shoot anybody, which is a challenge (not to mention, well, boring)), from the moment the player is literally dropped into the DMZ they are allowed to play the game in anyway they want. This applies for the in-game missions, finding the Deck of 52, or collecting the various “secret documents” or “Precious Antiques” that are scattered throughout the region. Just about anything the player can imagine is possible.
But, it is important to realize that Mercenaries has problems.
There are structural issues with narrative, the framerate for the game on the original Playstation 2 is painful on the eyes, there’s software errors that can create annoying glitches, and, honestly, driving is kind of a nightmare. Especially in tanks. How do you make driving a tank not fun? It’s a tank! These are small issues that a remaster, or emulation can fix or at least adjust. But these problems to me are never enough to take away from the freedom of the gameplay. It’s nowhere near the expanse of depth of a game like Skyrim, which can allow players to skip the entire main storyline and just collect books for a personal library, but Mercenaries’ open world created an experience unlike any of the games I played, or have played since.
It was a true playground that allowed me imaginative approaches to overcoming obstacles.
And I’ll be honest, usually those approaches were blowing things up.
I blew up a LOT of stuff.
I blew up airports. I blew up monuments. I blew up North Korean military barracks. I blew up chemical plants. I blew up trucks, tanks, and missile silos. If it could be blown up, I blew it up.
Blowing stuff up, was FUN.
At the time a game like Grand Theft Auto offered up a sandbox for players to explore the world, and the internet abounds with videos and articles of people getting machine guns and fighting police, tanks, and helicopters. This sort of gameplay was, I will totally admit, really fun. But where Grand Theft Auto drew the lines of their sandboxes was their missions where players had to perform a set of tasks and proceed along a specific route. Mercenaries was distinct because it didn’t mandate their player in that fashion. And, in hindsight, Grand Theft Auto’s option for cartoony violence was, and is, a tad abstract against its setting. Firing missile launchers at prostitutes in a remade version of Miami or New York, while ridiculous and sometimes humorous, was absurd in the most philosophic sense. If players could have dropped artillery fire on police in Liberty city, they almost certainly would have, but at that point the game would have veered off into Fortnite-level buffoonery.
Mattias was dropped into a combat zone and told to find 52 men (and women). How he did that was left up to the imagination, and maybe a cruise missile or two.
Joshua “Jammer” Smith
11.20.2023
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