Mercenaries is one of the upcoming top titles from LucasArts and one of the only non-star wars titles that are under development by them.
The game puts you in the role of one of three mercenaries, US, British or Scandinavian. Each of those characters has its own specific features. The US mercenary is stronger while the British one is female and has worked for British intelligence and has stealth capabilities. If you decide to play with the Scandinavian bloke, you’ll have the extremely interesting capability of speaking Russian. I say extremely interesting because you’ll be dealing with the Russian Maffia to get whatever you need in weaponry and armament.

Looking for a bazooka, helicopter or jeep ? The Russian mob will deliver it with a smile… for a price of course. However, that doesn’t mean you can do whatever you want with their equipment, getting a new jeep blasted into pieces minutes after delivery won’t make them too happy.

Keeping people happy isn’t the main part of the game of course. You’re a mercenary and your goal is to get missions accomplished and this with help from others. In total there’s 52 missions available and each accomplished mission will get you a card from a full deck.
Missions will be given by factions like the UN, Chinese, Koreans or the Russian mob. Keep any of these factions happy and they’ll help you with your mission and won’t stand in your way.

However, if you have done some harm to them, their reactions towards you will not be all too friendly. The great part of this system is that you can do some missions for the Chinese for instance which will result in them really liking you. If you then take on a mission against the Chinese, you’ll easily be able to penetrate their territory without violence until you start attacking them.

Mercenaries preaches total freedom of gameplay. Everything that looks like you can use it, can really be used. Buildings can be blown up by airstrikes (which you can demand from your allies) but if you like to do things yourself, you can just aswell blow them to pieces with your own arms.
The same goes for the missions. You can take any mission you want and if you don’t like working for the Koreans, you’re free to not react on their demands.
Another cool feature is the fact that you can take over any vehicle from whatever opponent; A helicopter flying over a bit too low ? Just jump up and kick the pilot out and you’ve got a brand new chopper at your disposal. Some tanks coming in to get rid of you ? Jump up on it, drop a grenade inside and after it blows you’ll be able to use the tank against those of your opponents. And all with fluent animations that look very realistic.

Although the game hasn’t been finished yet, the graphics already look awesome. I got to see and play the PS2 version but the developers confirmed me that the Xbox version would look even better.
The explosions are really great, but the thing that really struck me was the smoke. After an explosion or when a building caves in you’ll always have a cloud of dust and this just looks mighty impressive. And if that isn’t good enough, the smoke will react on actions happening near it like a helicopter flying over. Truly amazing !

Multiplayer isn’t planned which is a shame as it would definitely increase the longetivity of the game. The only thing I’m wodering at this point is how the devs plan to keep the game interesting but we’ll probably have to wait until release to find out. As it looks now, the technical specs will definitely not hold this game back.