. Maybe youve heard this one before as a battle-hardened bad it is your job to explore an expansive roaming environment by stealing vehicles and using overpowered ault weapons to clear your path. Of course the landscape is also peppered with various characters eager to ign you missions and reward your efforts. Sound like a tune youve been dancing to for a while Though you may not find Mercenaries incredibly original or compelling it gets a ton of mileage out of the fact that it is always fun to watch things explode. Always. . Set in a politically unstable North Korea (with several foreign powers vying for supremacy) Mercenaries puts you in the shoes of one of three elite soldiers-for-hire. Though each character technically has particular strengths the effect they have on actual gameplay is negligible any character can use any weapon and drive any vehicle. Fortunately there is a ton of each to experiment with leading to some truly hilarious carnage. I especially loved flying around in a helicopter lowering a winch to grab a ping civilian car and then slinging it into enemy fortifications. Then again its hard to beat that warm feeling you get after brutalizing an international criminal and leaving him lying handcuffed and prone next to some C4. . Though I certainly enjoyed dinking around like this for a while Mercenaries banks on the appeal of wholesale destruction rather than genuinely engaging gameplay. Though it is to be commended for trying to expand the standard cruise around doing missions experience the things it adds dont really contribute much. For instance though the concept of warring factions and fluctuating loyalties is cool it is painfully weak in execution. If you work with the Chinese you cheese off the Russian Mafia. However if you bribe them then everything is fine again.