The Grand Theft Auto series gets a Soldier Of Fortune facelift in Mercenaries, which shrewdly overlays GTA's wide-open, lawless urban territories with the bleak sprawl of war-torn North Korea. But here, the carjacking options include heavily outfitted SUVs, armored vehicles, and helicopter gunships. The weapons arsenal expands to rocket-propelled grenades and bunker-buster missiles. And gang warfare is now a sophisticated clash of warring nations and black-market profiteers. While comparisons to GTA are inevitable, right down to the queasy anti-heroism of killing for cash, Mercenaries complements an equally astonishing freedom of movement with endless variations on how each mission can be accomplished. With a minimum of handholding, the game rewards the tactically creative: You get out of the game what you put into it.
With clever allusions to contemporary geopolitics, Mercenaries drops down on the Korean Peninsula, where hopes for unification have been lost to the ruthless General Choi Song, a North Korean dictator who murdered his own father in a bloody coup. Concerned about Song's nuclear capabilities and shows of aggression, the "Allied Nations" turn to Executive Operations, a private company stocked with renegade soldiers-for-hire. As one of three ExOps bad-asses, you go on missions searching for the "Deck Of 52," composed of the "Most Wanted" officers, organized crooks, weapons scientists, and Special Forces thugs under Song's command. In the meantime, you also accept contracts from the Russian mob, the Chinese government, the South Koreans, and other factions, though staying in everyone's good graces requires a delicate balancing act.
Beyond the gameplay: Before the first grenade is pulled, the game establishes a chillingly realistic look at bombed-out North Korea, with a perpetual gray haze of smoke against an overcast horizon and propagandistic messages piped in over loudspeakers. Monuments to Song (which can be destroyed, thus boosting South Korean morale) echo Saddam's fallen statue in central Baghdad, and the presence of oily black marketers and morally compromised military men adds to the grim ambiance.
Worth playing for: Death from above. Hijacking an enemy helicopter offers plenty of opportunities to pick off encampments that were much feistier on the ground, but even better is the option to purchase laser-guided surgical strikes. For a mere $5,000 and change, you can cause hellfire to rain down as easily as if you were ordering a sandwich at a fast-food drive-through.
Frustration sets in when: As Robert Duvall sighs in Apocalypse Now, "Someday, this war's gonna end." During the long slog to capture or kill the Deck Of 52, battle fatigue sets in and the missions become repetitive, especially if you lack the creative energy to try anything more than just steamrolling over the opposition.
Final judgment: Juvenile as it sounds—what with the game's hyper-realistic yet bloodless take on global conflicts—the subtitle "Playground Of Destruction" delivers as advertised. With a heavy arsenal and no real boundaries, Mercenaries offers Armies Of One the chance to incite endless varieties of violent mayhem.