Mercenary Kings - Review

Title: Mercenary Kings

Format: Windows/Mac OS X, PS4 and Steam digital downloads

Release Date: March 25th for PC and Mac, April 1st for PS4, July 23rd, 2013 (Early Access) on Steam

Publisher: Tribute Games

Developer: Tribute Games

Original MSRP: $19.99 (free for April for PS Plus users)

MSRB Rating: M

For this review, I'll be playing the PS4 version

In the 1980's arcades were littered with quarter-munching machines like Galaga, Mrs. Pac-Man, and Metal Slug. As the NES flourished, we picked up Contra. Things were quiet for a while as newer Metal Slugs came out every year, yet there was nothing too new about them. Then, in 2013, we were given a gift. A gift that, on the name tag, said Mercenary Kings. Is this gift one of divine intervention that breathes new life into the genera, or is the box full of farts from your college room mate? I played about 7 hours of the game so far. Here's my review:

Story: Mercenary Kings opens up to you assaulting Mandragora Island, the hideout of the villainous organization known as CLAW. CLAW has kidnapped a lead scientist who has created a formula that heals wounds back to 100%. By using the local mandrake population, this solution was created. This attracted the attention of CLAW who has: kidnapped the head scientist, taken over the island, and has turned some mandrake into rogue fighters for CLAW. 

You play as the KINGS: a para-military group of five soldiers who have the important task of getting control of the island once more. That is, until you die by the hands of CLAW's goons. The only two who make it out are Code Name: KING, and Code Name: EMPRESS. These two are given an early version of the Mandrake Serum that recovers their wounds. Now, it's time to take on CLAW to rectify what they've done. Move out!

Conversations are text-based in a Metal Gear fashion

Game Play: Mercenary Kings is a 2D Action-RPG-Shooter, among so many others. Primarily: this game's major elements of game play contains elements of Monster Hunter, Borderlands 2, Metal Slug more than anything else. Each mission begins with you on the base, setting up your pack and gun for the next mission. There are five initial locations available, and you can acquire more allies as you progress through side missions within the game. If you've played any Monster Hunter games before this (specifically 3 Ultimate), you'll feel right at home. 

I mentioned guns above, and boy are there a lot of them. The amount of parts you can buy/craft is even higher than that. Each weapon has five basic parts, and you can unlock a sixth attachment after finishing the first group of missions. Completing missions, as well as selling treasure and materials, earns you money that you can use to buy new weapon attachments, elemental damage, and different bullet types like homing missiles and an impressive spread-shot that yields high damage. Half of the fun is running through the mission grouping, unlock the next rank of missions, and see what new weapons have been unlocked. There's tons of nods to pop culture within the game: everything from Army of Darkness, to Metal Gear and Rambo. I spent a majority of my time trying to craft a bad-ass weapon and kept finding myself saying "Aw man, now I want THAT part" once I unlocked new stuff. 

All of this sounds great, but does the actual game hold up? Thankfully, it does. The style is a 2D,

objection-based shooter. Each mission is broken down into a few different categories: fetch quest, enemy elimination, rescue mission, a final mission, hostage rescue, and a few others. There's ten different levels of missions, from Private to 5-Star General. As you progress, missions become harder, but the loot gets better. Missions are timed depending on their difficulty: quests in which you need to find stuff tend to have a 20-30 minute timer (which is way more than enough; on average, it takes about 9 minutes to finish a fetch quest), whereas missions where you rescue companions or have to kill "X" amount of enemies tends to have a shorter timer (around 5-10 minutes). 

Each mission is comprised of one main mission, and
occasionally one to two side missions.  Completing the side
missions yields extra money and collectibles that can be
bought with in-game currency.  

One last thing I'll mention is the weight mechanic. Logically, the more stuff you have on your person, the heavier you will be. The heavier you are, the slower your character will move. Things like your gun, extra weapons and first aid kits, and accessories such as mods increase your weight. The game does seem like it is unintentionally penalizing you for not having the best weapons. It does ass a little bit of strategy and realism, but for a game that's set on a fictitious island in the future-past where there's magical human-plants littering the island, it seems a little off.  

Visuals: The art direction is done by none other than Paul Robertson, the creator of such amazing sprite are as: Scott Pilgrim vs. The World: The Game and Fez. Although 16-bit visuals seem like they are back "in", this is no amateur work. You can actually check out some of Paul's work here. Environments are highly detailed. I've paused for a moment to look at some of the forest backgrounds and was supremely impressed; the same can be said for the outside and factory settings. 

The animations for the characters are "top-tier". Animations are fluid and there's little to no latency issues. Every once in a while the game would freeze, but it never crashed on me. after about a second, the game would return to normal. To clarify: this only happened once or twice. 

Audio: Background music isn't anything fancy: it's a catchy chip-tune soundtrack that fits into the universe well. It's dark, yet upbeat within a mission, and incredibly lax when you're on base managing your inventory. For each mission location, there's about 3 or 4 different songs that play. I'm not sure if this pattern continues all the way through the game, however what is there is great. 

Mission Loading screen. Load screens aren't too bad, but
get used to seeing this screen. 

Bosses have zone-specific music, which, although subtle, is a nice touch. There is one overlaying theme for some of the optional missions, which is fine. The song isn't bad, I suppose it's wishful thinking to ask for a little more variety. Compared to Monster Hunter, Borderlands 2 and Metal Slug, there is significantly more music in the main game. 

Online/Multiplayer: For once, I'm reviewing a game that actually has multiplayer. Mercenary Kings has both on-line and off-line co-op, up to 4 players. For online play, the host of the game is in control of the mission select, but the missions are limited to how far along the host is in the main game. Your weapons and equipment do carry over into the host's game, as well as your unlocks. When in a mission, the screen follows only your character, as opposed to most multiplayer co-op games where it zooms out. This gives you the feeling of exploration, without all of the work. It's a nice detail that works well in covering a lot of ground quickly. It's especially useful when your group is trying to find and activate the Final Boss on a stage. 

Pros: great music and sprite animation, catchy music, insane amount of weapon customization makes for a great meta game, 

Cons: missing a little more polish, a little more music variety would be nice, could use a higher enemy count for characters on screen

Final Score: 9.0/10 - near perfection; a little more substance and polish (and maybe diagonal shooting) needed. This game is a must have. 

Agree/Disagree with the score? Have a suggestion for a game? Questions about the ratings system, or anything in general? Ask me on Twitter @AdHocMan, or on Google+ at +ZacHockin

Next week - review of the new HTC One M8

inFAMOUS: Second Son - Review

Title: inFAMOUS: Second Son

Format: PS4

Release Date: March 21st - World Wide, May 22nd - Japan

Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment

Developer: Sucker Punch Productions

Original MSRP: $59.99 US

MSRB Rating: M

Well, it's time: Sony has finally delivered its first well-known First-Party game for the newest generation of consoles with the newest iteration of the inFAMOUS franchise. The team at Sucker Punch have made some huge strides in development, but is all of the "new" hype that I'm unintentionally giving it, or will this game go the way of Knack and miss out on the recognition that it may deserve? Here's my review:

*Author's Note: I've no experience with the past inFAMOUS games, so this review will not be comparing this game to the prior two, but rather my experience solely with Second Son*

Seattle, 2016. Looks pretty nice. 

Story: In the third iteration of the inFAMOUS franchise, the game opens 7 years after the events that took place in inFAMOUS 2. Since then, the Department of Unified Protection (D.U.P.) has gotten stronger, begun rounding up Conduits for processing, and has garnered support from most of the populace. You play as Delsin Rowe, as 20-something punk who is a talented graffiti artist, constantly getting in trouble with the law, and the newest hero/villain in the series. After acquiring your powers from a Conduit in an interesting way, you meet the main antagonist of the game: Broke Augustine. She causes harm towards the people in your village by shooting gravel shards into your people's bodies and gives you your first Hero/Infamous choice. After making your choice, your path begins. All of this happens within the first 15-30 minutes of the game. It's a strong start to the game and draws the player fairly quick into the game world. 

The main story's content varies depending on whether you choose to be good or evil. Delsin's mannerisms change as well. If you choose "good", Delsin is more compassionate towards people. As for the "evil" route, he's a bit more cynical and angry. All of this is somewhat expected in a game that gives you a moral-alignment choice.

One of the Conduits, Fetch, has the power of Neon

After the initial cut scene where you meet Augustine, your main mission of confronting Augustine begins. Whether you choose Good or Evil, the context of this story changes. Along the way, you meet up with other Conduits who will add to your arsenal of powers. With each Conduit, you are faced with an alignment choice regarding their future. Although the choices are black and white (red and blue), the choices themselves as to what you do with each person are interesting. 

Game play: If you've played any open-world game within the past five years (specifically Saints Row IV), you'll be familiar with the mechanics of Second Son. You have free range over the city's outer exterior as a human, and even more freedom once you start improving your powers. Jumping, climbing and running are all par for the course. Although some of the jumping mechanics can seem a little "floaty", the control scheme is tight and controls are responsive. 

Each Ultimate move does present some variety. The
Neon move captures enemies, stuns them, then has
you annihilating everything in front of you.  

The powers themselves are unique, yet similar. You have a long-range attack, a glide, a sprint, a heavy special attack, and your main melee weapon. Although visually impressive, they kind of leave a lot to the imagination. There are differences in speed and strength to the attacks, but they are all practically the same.  Your weapon (and the color of your controller's LED light) change depending on whether you've decided to play as Good or Evil, adding a nice touch to the game. 

There's three different powers you can acquire in the main game: Smoke, Neon, and another power I won't reveal for spoiler reasons.This is a welcome change to the typical Fire, Ice, and Electric powers that are in most games. Smoke gives you a teleportation power that makes me think of Nightcrawler from X-Men, and the sprint that comes with your Neon powers can be upgraded later in the game to last forever.  Once you finish the game, you receive the choice of whether or not to begin a new game, or play Janitor around the town and clean up the rest of the collectibles that are littered around Seattle. 

It's not as fast as the sprint from Saints Row 4, but
man is it pretty. 

As with most "moral-choice" games, you're practically locked into your moral path after you make your initial choice. There really is no moral ambiguity to the choices; everything is pretty much cut-and-dry from the beginning. You're almost encouraged to make a "pure" run of either Good or Evil. One specific moment comes to mind: right before the very last mission, it appears as if you have the "option" to pick Good or Evil as your final moral choice. Since I was running a "pure good" game, I figured "Eh, I'll save right now, do both endings, and get a better idea about the choices." Well, that didn't happen. If you decided to run a "pure" game, you're practically locked into your moral choice from the beginning. You can go around the city and farm civilians and enemies to switch your alignment, but it would take an incredibly long time. Short version: don't expect a plethora of morality choices like you would see in a Fallout game.  

This level of detail/quality has set the new standard
of how games should (and hopefully will) look. 

Visuals: Since this is a Sony First-Party game, the bar for visual quality has been set quite high, and Sucker Punch delivers as best they can. Simply put: the game looks great. Running in 1080p and 60 FPS, there wasn't really a point in which I said: "that doesn't look amazing". Animations, aside from the awkward jumping/wall scaling, are fluid. Melee attacks look, and feel, like they should. There's a noticeable difference in how you swing your weapon with Smoke powers, as opposed to Neon. 


As I said before, the city can be fully traversed. Each building has a high amount of detail on its walls, as well as its roofs and signs that are hanging outside of them. Couple the fully explorable environments with the fully loaded city and minimal loading screens, and you've got a feast for your eyes. 

Everything you see, even the Space Needle, can be traversed

If I had to pick out a gripe regarding the visuals, it would have to be the NPCs that are hanging around Seattle. There's only about 30 or so different people with re-skinned clothes multiplied over the city. Since they're a small team (around 100 people, give or take), I want to give them a pass; However, when I see environments, textures, and scenery like this (not to mention the water, which looks really good despite being unable to swim in it), it makes me wonder if they were rushed or simply didn't have the time or energy to put in that extra level of detail. 

An interesting mini-game has you tagging specific areas
within the game's world. You have two choices, either
morally good or bad, and that decision will add to your
karma alignment. This one is a "good" tag.

Audio: Troy Baker (Bioshock Infinite, The Last of Us, Final Fantasy XII, Saints Row 3 and 4, and hundreds of other roles) takes up the mantle of Delsin Rowe, and does an excellent job at bringing the character to life. Delsin is a punk, and Baker does the character justice. An early interaction between Augustine and Delsin gives you an idea how these two characters play out in the rest of the game.  

Some of the Conduit's dialogue/actors are weaker than Delsin/Baker. Augustine (voiced by Christine Dunford), although may be a somewhat cheesy B-Movie villain at points, really invokes an overpowering sense of anger and hatred both from and towards her. The moments in which she is "monologue-ing" towards Delsin are some of the more impressive vocal performances within the game. 

Environmental noise is somewhat limited. I expected more seagulls and hipsters to be sounding off than what I experienced. That doesn't necessarily mean that's bad, but the "city" does feel empty, like I said before. What is there is pretty polished. When a D.U.P. vehicle pulls you over because they see you using your powers, you will know it from the sirens, bullets whizzing by your head, and the group of Agents communicating with one another. The D.U.P. agents themselves sound a bit like the Combine from Half-Life 2 when they are trying to track you down. Some noises are noticeably "stock" sounds, such as bullets, cars, and people cheering. Hopefully in the future, Sucker Punch will add more depth to their audio files, such as NPC reactions/interactions and environmental noise. 

Online/Multiplayer: An interesting concept that the guys at Sucker Punch have come up with is a 6-week long mission that has you interact with both the game and an elaborate chase through specific websites in order to find out the back-story of a Conduit made of paper. Each week a new mission is added to the game, which explains why there's a 300+ megabyte update every week.  This DLC project will take place over a 6 week span, and by the time this review posts, it'll be week 2 (maybe 3) of this content. Supposedly, the problems that were plaguing the DLC have been fixed, however I went back a few days ago and received the same error message as before(an inability to connect to the online database). It could just be my internet connection, as I've heard that others have gotten further into the mission. 

Pros: Striking visuals, compelling story, freedom to get lost within the city, tons of collectibles, fairly easy to Platinum the game, great voice acting, and the environment is simply fun to play around in. 

Cons: Powers (although interesting and fresh) could use more variety among them, jumping/grabbing animations are a little off, some missions are locked due to karma levels, would like to see a more "neutral" option in a future game, could use more background audio throughout the city.

Final Score: 8.0/10 - A great job at a "new" IP that's on its way to being perfect. 

Agree/Disagree with the score? Have a suggestion for a game? Questions about the ratings system, or anything in general? Ask me on Twitter @AdHocMan, or on Google+ at +ZacHockin

Next week - Mercenary Kings for PS4 and Steam

QuizUp for Android and iOS Devices - Review

Title: QuizUp

Format: Download via iOS and Android marketplace

Release Date:  7 November 2013 (iOS), 6 March 2014 (Android)

Developer: Plain Vanilla Games

Current Price: Free

Genera: Quiz/Trivia Game

For this review, I'll be looking at the iPad and Android versions of the game

*Author's Note: In an attempt to change things up a little (as well as save some money), I'll be reviewing apps for a week or two. I'm still going to be reviewing games, but my intent is to also cover apps, movies, and maybe new technology that's coming out in the near future. 

QuizUp has been on iOS devices for a while now and has recently been gaining popularity. With its social network integration and easy to pick up nature, will QuizUp! be able to replace Trivial Pursuit as the king of trivia games, or will it be as spurned by the newest iteration of Dungeon Keeper? Here's my review:

Concept: QuizUp! has a rather simple concept: challenge your friend's knowledge, as well as random opponents over the internet, on concepts such as: food, video games, Spanish, How I Met Your Mother, cats, Arrested Development, with over 400 other categories to chose from, with new categories being added and older categories receiving updates quite often. Within all of these categories, there are hundreds upon hundreds of questions within each category. I've been messing around with this app for a few weeks now and I've yet to see a duplicate question. 

Within each quiz, there are 6 questions and one bonus question. For each question: you have ten seconds to answer. The faster you answer, the more points you can get, up to 20 points. On the final question, your points double, giving you that possibility of coming through in a clutch moment to secure a win. It's a really satisfying feeling. 

Visuals: Like the concept of the game, the visuals are clean, simple, and user friendly. Everything looks good. With a simple to understand interface and clear point totals, I've really nothing to say other than this game deserves high praise. It goes to show that you don't need a complex interface or lots of images on screen to make your game fun. 

Features: With the option to link your Facebook or Google+ account to the game, you have the ability to challenge your friends to games. With each game lasting less than a minute, you can get in and out with relative ease. In a sense, it's like Words with Friends, but you don't have to wait for a week for your opponent to make a move. 

You can also chat with past opponents, challenge them again, review past games, earn titles (which serve no purpose other than bragging rights) and forums where you can discuss topics. There's also in-app transactions that can increase your XP for an hour, but I found no reason to purchase it. 

The audio, although minimal (really only two songs and a few sound effects), commit to the minimal nature of the app. What's there is quite good. The music that plays during the challenge section is fairly intense and feels like older TV shows' final challenge round. 

Pros: clever design, fun concept, easy interface, short game times, ability to challenge friends, can sign up with e-mail as opposed to social media sights, app doesn't publish gobs of information on your timeline


Cons: can get somewhat boring playing several continuous rounds in a row. 

Final Score: 5/5

Agree/Disagree with the score? Have a suggestion for a game? Questions about the ratings system, or anything in general? Ask me on Twitter @AdHocMan, or on Google+ at +Zac Hockin

Next week - inFAMOUS: Second Son for PS4 (for real this time)