Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction was published back in 05, for PS2 and the Original Xbox. It was done by Pandemic and Lucas Arts. It's a open owrld third person shooter. Your thrust into an on going conflict in North Korea, based on the then current on going Iraq conflict. You take on contracts working your way thru a deck of 51, until the final mission. It has a high replyablity,due to the fact that you have carry over from your previous character, along with the fact that each character has their own secondary language so you can list into the additional conversations going on. There also multiple endings.

One bad thing about the game is the fact that you are unable to run over trees, this was fixed in the sequel.


The sequel called Mercenaries 2: World in Flames moved the action to Venezuela and becomes a revenge story, it had a number of issues at the release, it was developed by Pandemic Studios and published by Electronic Arts in 2008. It added quick time events, along with being able to actually destroy everything. However as stated previously there were a number of issues with the game form the start and some that are still present. Such as the behavior of the AI,and repetitive lines even after you have done something to alter the game world that is permanent.

The second game for the most part for me at least was a bit of a let down compared to the first game. But I sitll enjoy playing it from time to time.

The 1st game has a emulation on the 360,but due to a glitch it was unplayable for me past a certain point, luckily I was bale to find a copy of the game and play that on my old xbox.

The 2nd game was fun, but it got ruined by the servers going down.

The servers were brought back up..just don't expect to play co-op with anyone or use the last crappy DLC they released.