Reviews// Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction (Xbox)

When you first consider the range of missions available to you as a hired gun, it doesn't seem all that extraordinary, seemingly offering the same sort of thing as the 'GTA experience'. However, because each of these missions is conducted on behalf of opposing factions, there's a bit of politics to account for too. If, for instance, you agree to undertake a mission for the Russian Mafia that involves levelling South Korean barracks with a stolen tank, then the South Koreans will rightly be irked by your actions. And similarly, if you're working for the Allies when they tell you to assassinate a trio of Mafioso generals, you can expect to have some gangsters on your back when they find out it was you.

As a result, you have to constantly evaluate your standing with the different military forces. Once you've sufficiently pissed off a particular army they will view you as a threat and will shoot on sight, which can make travelling around certain territories even more dangerous than it was before. In the unfortunate event that you stumble across a firefight between two sides who both hate you, it is genuinely quite scary. You may have had no particular intentions to engage in battle, perhaps already on a taxi mission for a stranded journalist, when some pesky scamp spots you trundling through the background and fires a rocket at your vehicle. As the jeep pings through the air (yup, there‘s some comedy vehicle physics here) shedding a dead journo in the process, you will panic. You land slap bang in the middle of the crossfire with your energy blinking a worrying ‘1’ on the screen. You run. Through some trees. Aargh. Quick. Mountain. Must climb. You get to the top: safety, at last. Oh no! a mafia chopper! Quick, over the cliff. You slip, you tumble, you fall down a chasm. Oh no! what’s this? you’ve landed on the top of a secret North Korean military installation and now there’s a machine gun pointed at your head. Out of the frying pan, into the raging inferno.

It’s moments like these that evoke a genuinely nightmarish sensation. Such incidents can occur when you’re not even on a mission and, especially if you haven’t saved the game after a recent success, you’ll desperately want to survive. In GTA, when you found yourself in a scrap, the impulse was often to sit it out until everyone else is dead. In Mercenaries, however, you can be vastly outnumbered - and when there’s the possibility of an air strike on your head, the instinct is often simply ‘run away’. And that is actually a tremendous amount of fun. Panicking and fleeing aren’t average videogame ingredients, and we found the frequent urge to do so deeply engaging.