The balance between gameplay and realism is something that a lot of developers have been driven to understand and properly manipulate. On one hand, there is the increasingly large group of gamers that enjoy the simple pleasure of running around causing mass destruction and chaos, preferring to avoid any hint of storyline or complexity, while on the other hand there are the realism nuts who have memorized every single key binding to Freespace 2 or IL-2 Sturmovik and own several copies of Steel Battalion. Then, of course, there is the group of gamers in between, who enjoy a strong mix of both and want something accessible, yet also intellectually stimulating. Oh hell, who am I kidding? Gamers, as always, are a very diverse group of people with incredibly distinct tastes, and trying to make a game that can appeal to the majority of these individuals is a huge challenge. Between the graphics, gameplay aspects, interface, and other little nifty add-ons, trying to make a title appealing to everyone definitely isn't easy.

Oh, I? sorry, I? sure I have a point in here somewhere. That point is the fact that Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction is a true gem the likes of which I rarely see these days (last November/December's avalanche of gaming goodness aside) due largely to the way in which it blends realistic elements with simple gameplay to make a title that is, for lack of a better phrase, bad-ass, and I'm proud to say that my encounter with this game was a highly pleasurable one. While I'm still investigating possibilities to arrange an accidental carpet-bombing of their headquarters for canning Sam & Max 2, it's refreshing to note that LucasArts is actually still capable of releasing something worthwhile every now and then, rather than just shoveling out the same old Star Wars nonsense. Let? take a closer look at what makes this game so great, and why you, the attentive gamer actually bothering to read this article should seriously consider picking it up.

Taking place in Korea, Mercenaries focuses on the struggle between five different factions to try and restore order to a war-riddled nation, torn apart by the result of one mad dictator? lust for power. Basically, in a surprise move, the President of North Korea is assassinated by his own son (General Choi Song) during peace talks with southern forces, a son who then stages a bloody coup and seizes control. Thanks to his chain of 51 sub-commanders and comrades (all of whom, Song included, are referred to as the Deck of 52 throughout the game), General Song is quickly able to consolidate his power and become a major threat, and after word gets around about the nuclear arsenal he suddenly has access to, the Allied Nations, China, and the South Korean forces all start making a serious effort to take Song down ?even the Russian Mafia have some interest in the conflict. Of course, thanks to strained diplomatic relations and a whole bunch of red tape, none of the forces have the ability to resolve the situation in a quick and efficient manner, which is where ExOps, or Executive Operations?comes in, a private mercenary organization naturally contracting out to the highest bidder.

After selecting which Mercenary you wish to play as (there is a choice of three, which I'll go into in a bit), the game opens with a neat slideshow presentation by Fiona Tailor explaining to the ExOps executives what the current situation is and how they should go about handling it, and after the execs approve the operation, the game plants you in control of your chosen agent of destruction. The first real gameplay segment begins with your mercenary sitting in a chair in the cargo bay of a large plane, and after a brief verbal introduction by Fiona over the radio, you can get up and walk around, collecting a few basic essentials, including a rifle, some grenades, and, most importantly, your PDA. ExOps also provides an armed Humvee, with insertion done by simply throwing it into reverse and motoring out the back of the plane as it makes a low pass over the ground. Once you?e in position, the game then provides you with an objective to meet up with the local AN forces and go get your first contract.

As stated, there are three different mercenaries to play as, but this is ultimately just a small ingredient to the surprisingly flexible level of gameplay offered. Chris Jacobs is an American soldier capable of absorbing a crazy amount of damage before doing, British ex-MI6 member Jennifer Mui is a specialist in infiltration / sabotage, and finally Mattias Nillson is a Swedish fast-runner whose favorite hobbies include blowing up seventeen trucks in a row, just because he can (god did I love those commercials) and being an unpleasant person in general. But even though these characters have differing baseline stats, it's still ultimately up to the player in how he'll go about taking down the Deck of 52. One of Mercenaries leading features for the hype-bandwagon is the ability to basically go anywhere, do anything, and tackle objectives any way you see fit, and the game actually carries this off in an amazingly efficient manner ?even if it means a few bugs slip in here and there. One example would be a mission where I was required to assault a heavily defended fortress to take down an Ace of one of the card stacks (there are four, one stack for each type of card). The mission required me to basically assault the fortress head-on and try to smash my way in, but when I found this tactic lacking after a couple of attempts that resulted in my horrible death, I instead found an enemy helicopter, hijacked it, and flew into the rear of the enemy base to accomplish my objective. This had the added weird effect of making the Ace target get stuck inside his own base when he appeared, because the front gate he was supposed to run out of hadn't been annihilated by me like it was supposed to, had I taken the standard route.

Of course, that's just an extreme example, and was actually the only instance of that kind of problem I?e seen in the game. Other jobs are quite free-form in how they can be approached and react well to the multitude of options available to the player. Before I go into these options however, I'll go into the over-arching gameplay a little more. Running through the early parts of Mercenaries, it in fact began to strike me that the development team could've easily gotten away with calling this Grand Theft Auto: Korea. Lawsuit issues aside, the way the interface and gameplay elements interact with each other actually gave me the firm impression on numerous occasions that this game draws a lot of its inspiration from Rockstar's hit game series, which isn? necessarily a bad thing. The radar always visible at the corner of the screen highlights objectives and available missions in a similar manner to GTA, the PDA has a world map and keeps track of a whole bunch of different player statistics (shots fired, distance traveled, secrets found, etc), there are little pickups scattered all over the landscape (like weapons of mass destruction and lost artifacts) that give a decent amount of cash when retrieved, and also provide a secret bonus after five in a row are picked up.

All that said, Mercenaries still offers enough original content to make it an enticing and exciting experience. Playground of Destruction is in fact an almost perfect subtitle for this game, simply because of all the free-form opportunities the player has for blowing things up, gunning down hapless souls, or just causing general chaos. Cars, jeeps, tanks, and even helicopters (when they are flying low enough) can all be hijacked if the player gets close, weapons can be picked up from fallen soldiers, gun turrets of all sorts manned, and airstrikes called in, and thanks to all this there is basically no shortage of ways for a player to express the sadist within, and thanks to the sheer amount of destruction the player can cause with relative ease (given the right hardware), the game is tremendous amounts of fun. But the explosive action doesn't come at a cost to realism - at least, not completely. Your budding Mercenary is hardly indestructible, and while a hail of bullets isn? too much of a concern, concentrated fire from a number of machinegun emplacements is something one will want to avoid. Explosive weapons can be a cause for even greater concern and will usually knock your Merc down to critical health in one strike, and while being in a tank or other heavily-armored vehicle will make you almost totally immune to small-arms fire, it certainly won' last long against heavy weapons.

Which brings me to one incredibly neat concept the game brings to the table: the Black Market, which reminds me to a small extent of the Jagged Alliance series. Provided you?e in good standing with the Russian Mafia, you can call up their neato website on your PDA at any time and, for a cost, call in for a support element from 3 categories: Vehicles, Airstrikes, and Supplies. By selecting a support item from the website, the new option is added to your personal support inventory (accessible via the D-Pad) and can then be deployed. Each support type has its own method of calling in artillery barrages and vehicle / supply drops are summoned simply by dropping a smoke grenade, while more advanced attacks require either laser guidance or a satellite uplink. Spicing up the gameplay a little is the fact that hot zones can sometimes be saturated with jamming vehicles, which will cut off your support options until they've destroyed or moved out of range. But given how insanely useful a well-timed support option can be for getting out of a sticky situation (either by calling in for carpet bombing when half the North Korean army is chasing you around the map, or requesting a vehicle after your old ride gets ditched), the existence of the Black Market was something I was very thankful for throughout my adventures. Admittedly dropping smoke and having a chopper instantly appear to air-drop your requested package is a little unrealistic, but considering how great a chance the chopper has of being shot down (at your cost, no less) if you haven? rid the area of any anti-air sites, it balances out.

Interestingly, Pandemic chose to take the run-and-gun action of Mercenaries a little further by offering players a window for a stealthy approach, if they prefer to get in close before taking out a target, rather than just knocking down the front door and rolling over everything with a tank. The game has an intricate faction system split up between the four major parties (the Chinese, Russians, South Koreans, and A.N. ?the North Koreans are always hostile), and one faction or another will inevitably end up pissed off at you as you play through the game accepting contracts with contradicting interests. But fortunately, rolling around the controlled zones of a faction hostile to you without being molested by gunfire is still quite possible thanks to the game's disguise system. Hijacking (or special-ordering from the Black Market) a certain faction's vehicle will give you the ability to disguise yourself as one of their own, permitting you to zoom around their territory with little risk. However, performing any kind of suspicious act (like squishing somebody, getting out of your vehicle, or, oddly enough, blaring your horn) will cause the disguise to immediately wear off, and there are also marked officers wandering around to watch out for, as they'll see right through your attempted infiltration. That said, I still found it an insanely useful and cool way of scouting around a given area prior to an attack, especially given how easy it is to disguise oneself as a North Korean and tour their many facilities without getting shot up. And I would like to state for the record that the animation sequence for hopping onboard an enemy tank, opening up the hatch, and tossing a grenade inside is absolutely bad-ass.

One thing that really struck me is how well Mercenaries' control system works. The control system changes depending on if you're driving a regular vehicle, a tank, an aircraft, or just running around on foot and is not only easy to grasp, yet incredibly functional. Driving around in a standard four-wheel vehicle like a Humvee or civilian car, for example, is as simple as accelerating / reversing using the A and X buttons, with steering done via the left analogue stick (tanks work a little different, and rely on both sticks for moving and aiming the turret). A useful handbrake function is available with the right trigger, and the horn can be blasted with the B button to tell moron civilians to get out of your way or encourage allied troops to mount up. Being able to get friendlies into your vehicle has a number of obvious advantages (like having someone man the gun turret for you so you can keep driving when an enemy shows up), but I quickly found myself wanting a way to keep the troops inside of my vehicle and laying down cover fire every time I got out to go in on foot. It was then that I re-checked the control listing and noticed that this very function existed and could be accessed simply by pulling the left trigger, and that I could alternatively tell friendly forces to dismount from my ride with the white button. Simply excellent. All of the other control elements feel responsive and logical - even flying helicopters is fun and exciting rather than being a chore - so Pandemic definitely seems to have Mercenaries' control systems up to par.