When I play this game I feel overwhelmed, helpless, clueless, bored and lost. I can not for the life of me understand the ratings it got at the time (mostly eights and nines out of ten). The world is ugly, uninteresting and very lifeless. The vehicles have no feeling in them what so ever, all the missions are "go there, capture that person" which keeps my motivation at an all time low. On the cover I can read "go anywhere, blow up anything", but as soon as I got myself seated in a tank I discovered that I could not even run down a tree. Or a bush. Or a two feet fence. There just is no speed, no fluid gameplay and no clear oversight. I worked my ass off the first couple of sessions to become friends with the Chinese faction, and then I had to do work for someone else and then everyone hated me again. The very few vehicles I meet out on the road mostly want to kill me, and seems to be endlessly spawned once you had enough and try to take them down.
"Yeah, thanks for nothing Pandemic."
I have played many of these kind of games, I love Grand Theft Auto, Saints Row and Just Cause. I have done this before. But never have I felt so understimulated at the same time as frustratingly confused. Why is the simplest tasks in the game the very hardest to do? Needless to say, I really struggled with this one. After maybe five hours of playing this mess I caught myself playing the game just to being able to write this review. It felt like such a horrendous waste of time I contemplated just throwing the game in the trash. This gets no money at all online (I bought it for £0.01) so why bother trying to sell it?
Anywhere you go there are roadblocks and all kinds of stuff in the way for your vehicle. It is quite frankly mindboggling how a game hellbent on freedom prevents you from going anywhere without making it a pain. I gave Mercenaries a fair and thorough chance to shine and develop some nice characteristics in about five long sittings - but I now just feel empty. Yeah, thanks for nothing Pandemic.
