E-Mail This Article to a Friend A damn shame Mercenaries could have been a contender BY MITCH KRPATA
	Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction Published by LucasArts. Developed by Pandemic Studios. For PlayStation 2 and Xbox. Rated T for Teen.

There's no greater tragedy than potential unfulfilled. Some games make good on bold promises, and some never purport to be anything more than cookie-cutter. In between are games like Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction, in which every moment of frustration is compounded because what-might-have-been is clear to see.

You could describe Mercenaries as a cross between Grand Theft Auto and Halo and not be lying, exactly, but you would be disingenuous. The game is set in the near future, when North Korea has become a free-for-all war zone (there's a stretch) in which several factions – allies, Chinese, Russians, South Koreans, and North Koreans – vie for supremacy. As one of three guns-for-hire, your ultimate goal is the capture or killing of North Korean dictator General Song and 51 of his subordinates, each represented by a different playing card (collectively, they're known as the "Deck of 52"). Along the way, you can accept contracts from any of the warring groups in order to line your wallet.

This all sounds good so far. And, indeed, the design doc for Mercenaries must have blown some executives away. The game takes place on one massive, contiguous level, which is populated by what seem to be thousands of soldiers and vehicles. Characters can interact with the environment in many ways, from hijacking trucks and tanks, to flying helicopters, to manning machine-gun turrets. In one of the game's most innovative features, you can call in supply drops and air strikes anywhere you'd like, provided you've got the cash. Frankly, the only thing about this game that doesn't sound great is its bland title.

Ah, but then you start to play, and quickly it becomes clear that Mercenaries is, against all odds, a joyless, plodding exercise. The game delivers all the things it promises, but without élan.

The slow pace alone is maddening. Forget the interminable load times, the clunkiness of the navigational menus, or the cutscene you have to watch every single time you pick up an unconscious terrorist. The size of the game world, such a big selling point, often works against Mercenaries. In order to pick up contracts, you first must drive (or fly if you can, which takes much less time) to a faction's headquarters and pick up your instructions. Then, far too often, the mission takes place on the other side of the map; sometimes it can take a full couple of minutes to get there. Should you fail in your contract objectives, you have the option to start over … from the faction's HQ. To complete more difficult missions, you're likely to spend more time cursing as you traverse the game world yet again than you are actually causing sweet, sweet mayhem.

Even the mayhem, promised so lasciviously in the game's marketing, is not what you might expect. Though there are vehicle-based missions, stealth missions, and giant explosion-based missions, most of what you'll do is mow down drab-looking soldiers in sub-par, FPS-style gameplay. The game is third-person, but the controls work the same as in most console first-person shooters: left analog stick controls the character's movement, and the right-hand stick controls his aim. Play control is jerky, but at least the crosshair is forgiving, and most of your bullets will find their mark.

Still, there's great stuff here, even if most of it is great in theory rather than practice. The game world is so alive: choppers and jets crisscross the sky, you encounter random firefights, and there are even reporters and civilians caught in the crossfire (prepare to lose some cash when you accidentally run down a farmer in your Humvee). I love how many different ways there are to complete each mission. The three characters that you can portray really do offer their own strengths, though none of them is markedly more fun to play as than another. In many ways, I respect what Pandemic has done here more than I enjoy it.

If not for all the downtime and the generally sluggish feel of the game, this could have been a big winner (special attention should be paid to Peter Stormare's hilarious voice work as Swedish merc Mattias Nilsson), but even some of the neater aspects of Mercenaries are cool only in concept. For example, once after I loaded a subdued terrorist into an evac helicopter, the chopper's tail swung around and injured my character. That sounds brilliant in the abstract, but is it really something you should have to worry about in a game?

In their haste to make Mercenaries a deep, expansive experience, Pandemic has left too much fat on its frame. Since they'd already missed a Christmas release date (the game shipped on January 11), why not spend a little more time optimizing the experience? Mercenaries actually crashed on me at one point, which is the first time I can remember a console game doing that.

I sincerely expect better from the sequel.

Score: 6.0 (out of 10)