Review: Dragon Ball Z – Ultimate Tenkaichi (PS3)

When Mercenaries 2 was delayed from holiday 2007 to April 2008 by Pandemic (now owned by EA) there was some grumbling from the crowd. I wasn’t upset for two reasons. One, like you I want the developer to do it right instead of rush it out the door. Two, I wanted time to try out the original Mercenaries. It was apparently something of a classic so I finally got around to getting it from GameFly and took the PS2 version for a spin for a few hours over a couple of play sessions on my PS3. (Incidentally the Xbox version runs on the Xbox 360.)

Now I understand why people want a current-generation version of this game. Playing as many sides of the fence as you can as a private military contractor in a not-so-cold war zone set on the Korean peninsula is fun. Even at just about three years old the game holds up surprisingly well. Your overarching mission is to capture or kill a “Deck of 52″ cards of leaders of a military dictatorship of varying skills, armament, and temperament. The landscape is also littered with side missions, collectibles, and additional objectives you can take on for some extra spending money. Whatever you earn can be used to buy equipment on-the-fly. Just scroll to the drop you’ve unlocked or earned on the d-pad — from medical supplies to weapon drops all the way up to vehicles — find a flat spot on the ground, throw down the smoke marker, and in comes the helicopter delivery.

The game is a fun, sandbox-style, Havok-physics-powered open world that, while limited in some ways given the age of the PS2 platform it was built for, shows great attention to detail and variety in missions and military equipment. It’s also got something I love about these games: currency and multiple ways to earn it. The scoring system is in dollars, and in the early stages of the game I’m playing in I’m much more likely to rush the footsoldiers and subdue them instead of trying to shoot them. Capturing a “card” is far more lucrative than killing them, but it often requires you to sneak up on them and, after cuffing them, find a safe and flat spot for the evacuation chopper to land so you can chuck the guy in. There’s more than one way to skin these cats, so if you get frustrated the Allies are willing to settle for a photo of a carcass instead of a prisoner to, ah, extract information out of — information that can boost your own bottom line in the form of more missions.

There’s even something of a fiscal morality system in play. The PMC you work for is very direct in discouraging collateral damage, including civilian casualties, by immediately docking you big chunks of money to cover “very expensive PR” to counteract your mistake. Your goal is to take out the enemy, and that enemy, interestingly enough, changes based on who you’re working for and the ground you’re standing on.

The icing on the cake are collectibles and sets of side missions marked with dollar signs on the map. The missions can be as simple as winning a race with the given car (and dodging fire along the way from troops in the territory of opposing factions you drive through) or subduing a number of enemies that have taken over a factory in a given time limit. The collectibles include WMD boxes scattered around the map and boxes that add new air drops (which you pay for) to your arsenal. After reading about it on Wikipedia, I discovered the rather tongue-in-cheek WMD item “software key generator” on my own. Those monsters! You also get some credit for destroying monuments and listening posts, which is a little something to promote use of the C4 you get at the start of the game and can buy more of via supply drops.

Finally, a word about compatibility. The official PS3 compatibility search engine says “In NEW GAME mode, the opening FMV audio track skips at random points during playback”. The skipping doesn’t stop there, unfortunately. Every in-game cinematic I’ve seen so far will have audio track skipping that snips out words or phrases. Switching on subtitles helps but you’ll need to read fast to deal with the truncated sentences. It’s not a deal-killer by any means because while the voice work is very good (matching the music and other audio rather nicely) the rest of the game guides you along well enough that you’re not harmed by possibly missing half a cut scene sentence here or there.

If you haven’t tried it, go get Mercenaries for your PlayStation 2 or later or Xbox 1 or later system and run with it. If you’ve already played it, let us know what you thought of it, too.