By checking the CIA Work Factbook we discover that North Korea has many environmental problems including water pollution, water-borne disease, deforestation, soil erosion and degradation. The climate is temperate with rainfall concentrated in the summer and the whole country is slightly smaller than Mississippi. According to Mercenaries, North Korea also has an atmosphere as clear as a fish tank that gets cleaned annually by a muddy boot. We’re not going to say that this game suffers from fogging issues – it positively revels in them. This isn’t a problem – it’s just very noticeable and since you’ve already seen the screens and thought ‘brown’ we thought it probably warrants an explanation.

So you’re in North Korea, it’s a bit brown and a coup has turned an unstable political situation into one that enables foreign military factions to set up camp, and you, as the titular mercenary, to make money. You’re not just in it for the Benjamins though. Your mission is to hunt down the ‘deck of 52’. This deck denotes a set of wanted people who belong to the old regime and hold information pertaining to the countries Weapons Of Mass Destruction just like they had for Operation: Freedom in Iraq. You hunt these cards by working for each faction in a way not dissimilar to how you work for various gangs in Grand Theft Auto 2. Kill members of one group and you’ll lose favour with the others. Do some jobs and you’ll discover information on the locations of the members of the deck and so completing sub-missions will lead to the completion of your main goal. These jobs vary from just escorting informers, to destroying gun emplacements, individuals or even entire city blocks.

San Andreas didn’t need too much fog, you’ll be thinking. No, but then Mercenaries has something that no GTA game has ever had – it’s the Havok physics engine, as seen in Midway’s pretty spiffy Psi-Ops. This makes for some stunning action and an award we’re just inventing for this review. Yep, Mercenaries has our Awesome Award™ for Best Explosions In A Game Ever. Truly these are billowy beasts of fiery corpulence and only such poncey language can do them justice. Shoot an armoured car with an RPG and you’ll see the grenade spiral toward the target, strike, and it’s as if Satan himself has just popped a pimple. And because the RPG behaves like it should, there’s no guarantee that round will make a connection. It spirals as if travelling through real air and could easily verge slightly off course and go straight through the two front windows. This happened to us a lot and although it means you’ve lost some ammo it still means you get a pretty delectable detonation somewhere. And you know what we think of the explosions.

… continued