Mercenary Kings

Editor's Notes

PS4 version reviewed. Review was done with a mix of single and multiplayer.

Introduction

From the cold depths of Canada (Montreal) comes indie developer Tribute Games. Made up of ex-Ubisoft developers, much of Tribute Games' staff is responsible for 2010's 'Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: The Game,' which is one reason to be excited for Tribute Games new PS4 & PC title, 'Mercenary Kings.' But where the 'Scott Pilgrim' game was a cute, challenging beat 'em up backed by a major publisher, 'Mercenary Kings' plows new furrows as a side-scrolling shooter, crowd-funded and then refined through an early access program. Boasting local and online co-op, the shooter has one foot in the retro past, and another solidly in the present, but is that enough to make this PS4 PS Plus title worthy of players' attention?

The Game Itself: Our Reviewer's Take

When it comes to 'Mercenary Kings,' prepare to be surprised in many ways, and not all of them good. Side-scrolling games like 'Contra' (not unlike beat 'em ups or shmups) were born and bred in the arcades, and maintain a quarter-popping, action-packed, and otherwise shallow experience. These are great games to tackle in a few hours' time, with or without friends. Even classic 'Mega Man' titles are meant to be beat in relatively short order. Though the influence is there, 'Mercenary Kings' is another beast altogether and offers serious depth through its missions, item & ability gathering and crafting, and vast array of unlockable, counter purpose objectives.

The game sports a 33 page digital manual, and while each page only holds a snippet of information, there's no wasted space. Though it's fun to pick up and play the very first time, that is mainly due to the novelty of the experience. There's something of a harsh learning curve after a mission or two, and that curve lasts. Even the game's story set-up, which ends with two playable characters ready to start combating the forces of C.L.A.W. on Mandragora Island, is lengthy if the player is just expecting a simple arcade-style shooter.

Controlling either of the two surviving Mercenary operatives, King or Empress, the player starts with a hunting tutorial before moving on to the first rank of missions. The d-pad controls movement and allows the player to pick up items and aim their gun up, and in mid-air, down (the left analog works as well, but I much preferred the d-pad). The Square button fires the gun, X is jump, Circle is forward roll, Triangle is melee with the knife, and R1 is the ever-important reload.

This is not a game likely do well with a twenty minute demo. The game uses 'Gears of War' style action reloads, and the first hour or so of play is an exercise in constantly reloading six shots. The missions, which range from eliminate, capture, and gather styles, all require some degree of exploring a level, searching for an objective while facing two major constraints. The player has health, health items and in-level restoration areas, but dying during a mission only costs a few reward dollars. The player can loss three lives per mission, but a fourth means failure. Worse though by far, is the constraint of time.

Each mission has a hard time limit, anywhere from 5-30 minutes. The player can fight, die, step into an infirmary to heal, chase down a boss, teleport to a level's beginning, or repeatedly kill the same respawning enemies, it makes no difference, the clock never stops. Suddenly, jamming your weapon on a bad reload, or missing an elevator, or backtracking and having to rekill a level's worth of enemies means wasted time. Early on, failing a 15 minute time limit can feel like a complete waste of time. Annoying, time consuming enemies can easily test the player's resolve.

Make no mistake, a failed mission has merit, and not just practicing being bad at the game. In addition to learning about all the enemy techniques and really learning the level lay-outs (making sense to what the map shows), failing a mission has one other crucial benefit. Though consumable items like Rations (health) and C4 are lost when used and can only be picked up in very limited working quantities (one C4 and a few rations is a maxed out inventory), all of the crafting materials found through the levels and dropped by enemies, stay with the player even through mission failures.

Once you can start crafting your own six-piece guns, knives, and bionic mods, the game changes. You begin to understand how to focus on mission priorities, weighing time against (both secret and announced) side objectives, or other looting opportunities. For me, this meant getting a high-rate of fire weapon with high capacity magazine, which later morphed into a long-range, acidic bullet firing assault rifle.

The variety of weapons and weapon combinations is ludicrous, and equipping newly-crafted gun parts requires that the user pay attention to their overall load weight as heavy firepower makes for a heavier, slower player. When you reach the point where having to chase bosses all around a level is no longer frustrating, the true playground nature of the game becomes clear. And this is just the single player portion of the game.

Boss fights are challenging and nail a nice mix between dynamic and not-too-frustrating, a characteristic which could be applied to the game at large. Though the player can affect the difficulty by getting better weapons, more health, buying power-ups, etc., the game's difficulty is nevertheless restrained. Levels are full of moments where I thought, "If this were 'Mega Man,' that pit would kill me in one hit or the those platforms would disappear. If this were 'Castlevania,' that flying robot would juggle me back and forth five times before knocking me into the preceding area or that boss would just fill the screen until I was good and dead."

One issue for the game is loading times. A 15-20 second load time bookends every mission, pass or fail. Even the attract mode movie requires an annoying load screen (the helicopter on black). In-mission, entering and exiting rooms is fortunately not subjected to this same boggy wait time. I pray a patch will relieve this oversight of an issue along with an option to customize the controls and disable the touchpad map control.