Around Xmas time I would occasionally pop onto places like amazon or whatnot and look at the crazy flash deals since most people don't get me games or such. I was looking at the massively discounted price for PlayStation Plus subscriptions, and on a whim got a few years of it, keeping me up to date for the next few years. What I have come to learn having never had this service until recently, is that the free games you get you keep as long as you keep the subscription.
This has been exceptionally handy with purchasing a PS4, because each month they keep releasing more and more quirky indie titles and in the dead zone early stages of a starting console, the new system needs games. This has actually provided me a pretty good number of different games to try which I have yet to review, but I have to take time to talk about this one because it stands tall over the rest of them so far.
MERCENARY KINGS
Mercenary Kings comes to us from the minds over at Tribute games, who brought previous indie success Wizorb and reunited the team behind Scott Pilgrim vs. The World: The Game. Which means we are being treated to a wonderfully rendered 2D side-scrolling shooter in gloriously retro 16 bit pixel graphics.
The storyline for Mercenary Kings is a little lacking. The Mercenary Kings are an elite group of five military mercenaries who have been called in because Mandragora island, where the top secret Mandrake formula is being engineered, has been taken over by rival military organization CLAW and their leader Baron. A fruitless effort because CLAW has already made use of the Mandrake Formula, the battle is completely one sided and the Kings are cut down effortlessly.
The storyline for Mercenary Kings is a little lacking. The Mercenary Kings are an elite group of five military mercenaries who have been called in because Mandragora island, where the top secret Mandrake formula is being engineered, has been taken over by rival military organization CLAW and their leader Baron. A fruitless effort because CLAW has already made use of the Mandrake Formula, the battle is completely one sided and the Kings are cut down effortlessly.
But while the project's chief engineer has been captured, the other half of the project in Professor Bluebell managed to escape and meet up with the Kings with the secret of the mysterious mandrake formula. The bodies of King and Empress were recovered and through medical procedures, they were saved and given enhanced physical abilities to give them a shot at a little payback against the claw, and hopefully stop their aspirations of world domination using the mandrake formula.
So this is probably an incredibly general gloss over of the story, and I'm not even sure all of that is right. I'll say right off that a significant portion of the story is pretty forgettable and ultimately not all that important. As you complete cutscenes there are usually little Metal Gear style vignettes between the characters to pad out the storyline and build the characters a little. But to be totally honest a lot of it is pretty bland and if you are like me will probably skip a good portion of it to get back to the action.
Speaking of, why don't we get right down to it shall we? The game starts off with a little bit of story and a small tutorial to acclimate you to the controls and let you hunt a few animals and find some chests. Once you complete this first mini stage you are treated to your base camp which is where you will meet all the various NPCs. Here is where you can jump into a private or public online game, check out the compiled bestiary, hang out in your characters tent (pointless), customize your characters color, buy supplies for the mission, or select and start your missions. There are more features you unlock as you rescue more of the team as you play through.
There are two very important people at base camp: one of them you start with, Prof. Bluebell, and from her you can purchase new mods for your character such as increased speed, more power, better healing, and so forth, but be weary what you take because they affect your weight, you do need to find the necessary materials in the stages to build these modifications. The other is one of the first people that you rescue, your gunsmith, and she is who you can purchase better equipment for your guns from, and thus she becomes the most important NPC in the base.
I don't play a lot of Borderlands but I am told that the mind bending weapon customization draws a strong comparison to that. When you talk to the gunsmith, you are given a list of parts of a gun you are purchase over several different types, each with stats to customize them in different fashions and producing different effects. I tend to use a sub machine Gun receiver for a high rate of fire and a light weight barrel and magazine so I an cruise at high speed while getting a decent number of shots before reloading. Not the highest powered weapon though.
You start off with a basic pistol, but you have options of handguns, magnums, assault rifles, sub machine guns, machine guns, shotguns, and sniper rifle parts spanning over receivers, barrels, magazines, stocks, sights and what ammo type you would like to use with them (which is the aspect that will have compatibility issues.) In order to purchase new parts you need to find the right materials in the levels, as well as saved up enough money to purchase the modifications, same as from the professor. So expect to chat these ladies often.
So once you have selected a mission to do, you are dropped off in the stage. The missions you have to do vary depending on what you selected. Sometimes its something simple like get from point A to point B. Sometimes you have to kill X amount of enemy, sometimes it wants you to gather X amount of a specific material, or sometimes you have to rescue hostages. Usually you will be doing them same map per rank of levels, but the changing objectives will occasionally switch between them or drop you off in different places.
This is obviously where the game shines. It its relatively simplistic in design and very familiar. Looking at the graphics alone, it looks likes the Scott Pilgrim vs The World game decided to cosplay as Metal Slug characters. Everything is detailed in very well animated 16 bit sprites that are brightly colored and given several frames of animation.
Its play style also rings of Metal Slug and classic Contra as you fly through the map blasting away baddies as they appear on the screen. But the levels aren't always linear and become even less so when you start to advance. In this regard I feel that the game rings familiar to something of the original Metroid or Castlvania or even Mega Man depending on what the layout of the level is. A great way to get acclimated to the stages are to start off with a gathering mission. This will allot you 30 minutes on the time to explore the map and collect whatever various gubbins you are set to find.
What makes this plan effective is you get a better idea of the layout of the maps, and the enemies tend appear in the same areas, and unless its a mission to clear them out they will respawn nearly indefinitely in these places. So after doing missions like collecting you'll have a better familiarity for which paths are the easiest to take and where what enemies might show up. You keep the rewards you find as you play along, and get rewards at the end of the mission, but you get bonuses if you can complete these within a certain time frame. The first mission for example I couldn't do without equipping a pair of sprint mods and skipping most enemies.
Throughout the stages you will occasionally stumble on NPC characters or chests around the map. Orange chests then to give up some kind of supply reward, usually something that the enemies of that area don't often drop or are less likely to drop, but there are also red chests that offer supplies to use in the map such as rations and first aid for health, C4 for big damage or path opening, grenades for damage, and shock bombs for capture. In addition to the chests, you also get a transceiver which allows you to have health and equipment airdropped, or lets you teleport back to the start, or quit the mission. Your transceiver use is limited though so use it wisely.
The game also features 4 player co-op, which is exceptionally handy for gathering missions. As you progress in the game, maps get bigger and the supplies you need are found in chests all over the place. So getting those extra bodies to fan out certainly help when you are racing a timer on a huge map. Since you are not handcuffed together, its possible you might never see a teammate, which can both good or bad. If the starting screen is any indication, it looks like the game could also feature split screen local co-op, but I haven't tested that.
I do have a bit of a problem with the matchmaking as it seems to be kind of random. I'll set myself to public and then while browsing a menu, I'll come back to see that there are 2 other guys running around my base waiting to start a mission. But then there will be times where I will wait for someone to drop in so I can pick a mission, then I am yanked from my game and plunked in someone else's, thus taking away my ability to choose the mission. So that can be annoying because unless you are inviting friends, there really seems to not be clear instructions on how to host a game.
So what don't I like about the game? Well, for one, its biggest knock against the game is buggy as shit. When I first downloaded the game I would get these drops in audio where the music would just stop for a second before continuing, like an annoying scratch on a CD in the middle of a favorite song (for you old people who used CDs). If this was the only problem I had with the game, then honestly I probably would have ignored it.
But it wasn't the only problem. Occasionally during play I will get these moments where the game will freeze for a second, and the cut back to real time. A lot of the times this isn't even an issue but there has been an handful of instances where I have taken damage from an enemy or miscued a jump because I missed that whole moment of animation. That's really annoying but its not even the worst problem.
The worst problem is that in rare (and sometimes not that rare) instances the game will just crash back to the PS4 desktop, and asking me if I want to send an error report. This is exceptionally infuriating because the time that it has most often happened to me is just after I have completed a mission. At the start and end of every mission there is a loading sequence where you see your guy/gal riding a chopper. On the way back once that finishes loaded you appear in camp. JUST as the load ends, the game crashes to the dashboard. And because you never made it back to camp, it didn't save your progress. Meaning the last mission you completed you had to do all over again.
This almost made me put the game fucking down for good, because I was doing an exceptionally difficult gathering mission that took me 29m:30s of 30 minutes to complete only to have it crash and throw out my progress. I only had one day where this kept happening to me, but hopefully this is something they patch up soon because the game is too good to be bogged down with annoying bullshit like this. '
The weapon shop menus can be kind of clunky and annoying as you play on. It starts off small and relatively easy to manage but as you play on you get a ridiculous number of options to pick from. What is annoying about this is the only filters the game has to offer are the things your purchased, and the things you didn't. This doesn't really filter things down all that much because ultimately you are going to be wanting to look at what new stuff you can buy. What the shop menu needs is a filter so I can sort out the available items by gun type. I'm building around a sub machine gun build so I would be kind of nice to be able to just look at those parts.
I wouldn't mind if you there was more than 2 characters to play as too. You have all these characters at the base? Probably couldn't have been that hard to make a few more of them playable. Eh, maybe a future DLC pack?
I suppose the game can also get repetitive too. The missions don't often change as you move up in ranks, just the locations and the palate swaps and difficulty of the enemies do somewhat. Usually by some means of elemental damage, (the red guy attacks with fire? You don't say!). And I will say that it was kind of disappointing that you tease 3 different looking elemental baddies, only to have all three of the use the same attack pattern and AI. The bosses all suffer from this, once you learn the attack pattern it doesn't matter what color they are, they just become a fodder enemy. But then again, changing your gun type drastically changes you approach so maybe I am nit picking.
So I have this shiny new 400$ video game console, loaded with out the butt hardware and awaiting these awesome looking shiny new vidya gaimz and what am I doing with it? I'm playing a game that looks and sounds like it would be right at home on the Super Nintendo. And you know what? I am completely cool with that.
I think I have figured out why things like PlayStation, Xbox, and Kickstarter seem to be making a grab for games like this. It seems like the general populous has realized something that I have been saying since around the Playstation one era, is that graphics are not what make a game. A great game is what makes a game. So now we are seeing these incredibly high powered machines now getting these wonderfully retro designed games with features the old systems couldn't have handled because of size restraints.
I think we are standing on the edge of a very, very exciting rebirth of retro style games. It's showing everyone that a game with a 2+ plus year life cycle of development with AAA everything doesn't guarantee success. But something with simple and solid mechanics and still produce an incredibly fun experience for just as long and at a fraction of the price. This makes me very excited and hopeful for the upcoming River City Ransom: Underground and hopes that that one also gets a console release.
At time of writing Mercenary Kings is free for Playstation plus users, and is 19.99$ regularly. Despite the small handful of faults I could come up with the game is has still proven to be entertaining enough that for 20+ hours I am still playing it, still unlocking things, still trying to just complete the game. For an arcade game that is a hell of a feat, and even more so when I still have sealed full retail priced games waiting to be played sitting on my desk taking a back seat to these.
Mercenary Kings is currently available for playstation 4 and on steam, its an absolute blast to play single player or with friends, has a wonderful 16 bit charm, and once they get the bugs worked out might be a near perfect experience. Highly recommended title here and possible sleeper in the 2014 Ragey's. Get it.
 |
| So uh, how elite is this group if they could only afford one bed for recovery? |
So this is probably an incredibly general gloss over of the story, and I'm not even sure all of that is right. I'll say right off that a significant portion of the story is pretty forgettable and ultimately not all that important. As you complete cutscenes there are usually little Metal Gear style vignettes between the characters to pad out the storyline and build the characters a little. But to be totally honest a lot of it is pretty bland and if you are like me will probably skip a good portion of it to get back to the action.
Speaking of, why don't we get right down to it shall we? The game starts off with a little bit of story and a small tutorial to acclimate you to the controls and let you hunt a few animals and find some chests. Once you complete this first mini stage you are treated to your base camp which is where you will meet all the various NPCs. Here is where you can jump into a private or public online game, check out the compiled bestiary, hang out in your characters tent (pointless), customize your characters color, buy supplies for the mission, or select and start your missions. There are more features you unlock as you rescue more of the team as you play through.
 |
| I feel a "Snake?... Snake?!.. SNNNNAAAAKE!" opportunity was missed here. |
There are two very important people at base camp: one of them you start with, Prof. Bluebell, and from her you can purchase new mods for your character such as increased speed, more power, better healing, and so forth, but be weary what you take because they affect your weight, you do need to find the necessary materials in the stages to build these modifications. The other is one of the first people that you rescue, your gunsmith, and she is who you can purchase better equipment for your guns from, and thus she becomes the most important NPC in the base.
I don't play a lot of Borderlands but I am told that the mind bending weapon customization draws a strong comparison to that. When you talk to the gunsmith, you are given a list of parts of a gun you are purchase over several different types, each with stats to customize them in different fashions and producing different effects. I tend to use a sub machine Gun receiver for a high rate of fire and a light weight barrel and magazine so I an cruise at high speed while getting a decent number of shots before reloading. Not the highest powered weapon though.
 |
| The mods get more ridiculous as you go along... The Flusher... lol. |
You start off with a basic pistol, but you have options of handguns, magnums, assault rifles, sub machine guns, machine guns, shotguns, and sniper rifle parts spanning over receivers, barrels, magazines, stocks, sights and what ammo type you would like to use with them (which is the aspect that will have compatibility issues.) In order to purchase new parts you need to find the right materials in the levels, as well as saved up enough money to purchase the modifications, same as from the professor. So expect to chat these ladies often.
So once you have selected a mission to do, you are dropped off in the stage. The missions you have to do vary depending on what you selected. Sometimes its something simple like get from point A to point B. Sometimes you have to kill X amount of enemy, sometimes it wants you to gather X amount of a specific material, or sometimes you have to rescue hostages. Usually you will be doing them same map per rank of levels, but the changing objectives will occasionally switch between them or drop you off in different places.
This is obviously where the game shines. It its relatively simplistic in design and very familiar. Looking at the graphics alone, it looks likes the Scott Pilgrim vs The World game decided to cosplay as Metal Slug characters. Everything is detailed in very well animated 16 bit sprites that are brightly colored and given several frames of animation.
 |
| Apparently, I'm the only one with any love for the ladies. |
Its play style also rings of Metal Slug and classic Contra as you fly through the map blasting away baddies as they appear on the screen. But the levels aren't always linear and become even less so when you start to advance. In this regard I feel that the game rings familiar to something of the original Metroid or Castlvania or even Mega Man depending on what the layout of the level is. A great way to get acclimated to the stages are to start off with a gathering mission. This will allot you 30 minutes on the time to explore the map and collect whatever various gubbins you are set to find.
What makes this plan effective is you get a better idea of the layout of the maps, and the enemies tend appear in the same areas, and unless its a mission to clear them out they will respawn nearly indefinitely in these places. So after doing missions like collecting you'll have a better familiarity for which paths are the easiest to take and where what enemies might show up. You keep the rewards you find as you play along, and get rewards at the end of the mission, but you get bonuses if you can complete these within a certain time frame. The first mission for example I couldn't do without equipping a pair of sprint mods and skipping most enemies.
Thanks to the PS4 removal of HDCP and USB use, I can finally start shooting some Next-gen Lets plays again
Throughout the stages you will occasionally stumble on NPC characters or chests around the map. Orange chests then to give up some kind of supply reward, usually something that the enemies of that area don't often drop or are less likely to drop, but there are also red chests that offer supplies to use in the map such as rations and first aid for health, C4 for big damage or path opening, grenades for damage, and shock bombs for capture. In addition to the chests, you also get a transceiver which allows you to have health and equipment airdropped, or lets you teleport back to the start, or quit the mission. Your transceiver use is limited though so use it wisely.
The game also features 4 player co-op, which is exceptionally handy for gathering missions. As you progress in the game, maps get bigger and the supplies you need are found in chests all over the place. So getting those extra bodies to fan out certainly help when you are racing a timer on a huge map. Since you are not handcuffed together, its possible you might never see a teammate, which can both good or bad. If the starting screen is any indication, it looks like the game could also feature split screen local co-op, but I haven't tested that.
I do have a bit of a problem with the matchmaking as it seems to be kind of random. I'll set myself to public and then while browsing a menu, I'll come back to see that there are 2 other guys running around my base waiting to start a mission. But then there will be times where I will wait for someone to drop in so I can pick a mission, then I am yanked from my game and plunked in someone else's, thus taking away my ability to choose the mission. So that can be annoying because unless you are inviting friends, there really seems to not be clear instructions on how to host a game.
So what don't I like about the game? Well, for one, its biggest knock against the game is buggy as shit. When I first downloaded the game I would get these drops in audio where the music would just stop for a second before continuing, like an annoying scratch on a CD in the middle of a favorite song (for you old people who used CDs). If this was the only problem I had with the game, then honestly I probably would have ignored it.
But it wasn't the only problem. Occasionally during play I will get these moments where the game will freeze for a second, and the cut back to real time. A lot of the times this isn't even an issue but there has been an handful of instances where I have taken damage from an enemy or miscued a jump because I missed that whole moment of animation. That's really annoying but its not even the worst problem.
The worst problem is that in rare (and sometimes not that rare) instances the game will just crash back to the PS4 desktop, and asking me if I want to send an error report. This is exceptionally infuriating because the time that it has most often happened to me is just after I have completed a mission. At the start and end of every mission there is a loading sequence where you see your guy/gal riding a chopper. On the way back once that finishes loaded you appear in camp. JUST as the load ends, the game crashes to the dashboard. And because you never made it back to camp, it didn't save your progress. Meaning the last mission you completed you had to do all over again.
This almost made me put the game fucking down for good, because I was doing an exceptionally difficult gathering mission that took me 29m:30s of 30 minutes to complete only to have it crash and throw out my progress. I only had one day where this kept happening to me, but hopefully this is something they patch up soon because the game is too good to be bogged down with annoying bullshit like this. '
The weapon shop menus can be kind of clunky and annoying as you play on. It starts off small and relatively easy to manage but as you play on you get a ridiculous number of options to pick from. What is annoying about this is the only filters the game has to offer are the things your purchased, and the things you didn't. This doesn't really filter things down all that much because ultimately you are going to be wanting to look at what new stuff you can buy. What the shop menu needs is a filter so I can sort out the available items by gun type. I'm building around a sub machine gun build so I would be kind of nice to be able to just look at those parts.
I wouldn't mind if you there was more than 2 characters to play as too. You have all these characters at the base? Probably couldn't have been that hard to make a few more of them playable. Eh, maybe a future DLC pack?
I suppose the game can also get repetitive too. The missions don't often change as you move up in ranks, just the locations and the palate swaps and difficulty of the enemies do somewhat. Usually by some means of elemental damage, (the red guy attacks with fire? You don't say!). And I will say that it was kind of disappointing that you tease 3 different looking elemental baddies, only to have all three of the use the same attack pattern and AI. The bosses all suffer from this, once you learn the attack pattern it doesn't matter what color they are, they just become a fodder enemy. But then again, changing your gun type drastically changes you approach so maybe I am nit picking.
So I have this shiny new 400$ video game console, loaded with out the butt hardware and awaiting these awesome looking shiny new vidya gaimz and what am I doing with it? I'm playing a game that looks and sounds like it would be right at home on the Super Nintendo. And you know what? I am completely cool with that.
I think I have figured out why things like PlayStation, Xbox, and Kickstarter seem to be making a grab for games like this. It seems like the general populous has realized something that I have been saying since around the Playstation one era, is that graphics are not what make a game. A great game is what makes a game. So now we are seeing these incredibly high powered machines now getting these wonderfully retro designed games with features the old systems couldn't have handled because of size restraints.
 |
| Spoiler alert: Empress dies at the beginning |
I think we are standing on the edge of a very, very exciting rebirth of retro style games. It's showing everyone that a game with a 2+ plus year life cycle of development with AAA everything doesn't guarantee success. But something with simple and solid mechanics and still produce an incredibly fun experience for just as long and at a fraction of the price. This makes me very excited and hopeful for the upcoming River City Ransom: Underground and hopes that that one also gets a console release.
At time of writing Mercenary Kings is free for Playstation plus users, and is 19.99$ regularly. Despite the small handful of faults I could come up with the game is has still proven to be entertaining enough that for 20+ hours I am still playing it, still unlocking things, still trying to just complete the game. For an arcade game that is a hell of a feat, and even more so when I still have sealed full retail priced games waiting to be played sitting on my desk taking a back seat to these.
Mercenary Kings is currently available for playstation 4 and on steam, its an absolute blast to play single player or with friends, has a wonderful 16 bit charm, and once they get the bugs worked out might be a near perfect experience. Highly recommended title here and possible sleeper in the 2014 Ragey's. Get it.
