Mercenary Kings is the new downloadable bet on Playstation 4 for this week. Plus users can download it for free and the rest must pay a considerable amount of 17.99 euros.
All to access a side scrolling shooter that appeared some time ago also on PC and that aims to reformulate the type of game Metal Slug with classic additions of the current era.
Shooting right and left, cooperation with friends and a visual section that pays homage to the 16 bits. He has everything to succeed in the era of the heyday of the indies, although with nuances.
The title places us in the middle of a conflict that can be devastating for humanity. A scientist has managed to develop a series of biological elements that can improve and much human capabilities, but a group of terrorists assaulted the island in which this scientist was and has captured him. In the face of such a crisis , only one man / woman can solve this problem. And that is you.
Once we choose lightly our sex and the skin color of our character, it’s time to do the little tutorial that tells us what we have in hand. Then the good starts, coming to our settlement from which we will choose missions and forge a hero.
The mechanics of the game is quite simple. We control a character in a 2D Metal Slugplane , which has a firearm capable of firing in any direction. To this are added the classic movements like jumping, bending over and also a body-to-body hit recreated with a knife.
With these weapons we have to comb various maps with endless roads and alternatives. Unlike most classic 2D shooters of the nineties, here we do not go from point A to point B to finish the phase, but the maps have a Metroid type distribution. We move freely for them, going backwards, looking for paths that we had omitted, etc.
In them we find all kinds of enemies, obstacles in the form of jumps, treasures, hostages and a lot of different materials that we can collect and that go far beyond the first aid kits, which are also there. It’s one of the game’s graces, that in addition to the main mission of each challenge – with its added side missions – there is also an important exploration component.
Killing enemies, reaching treasures, killing animals, all of which allows us to access materials that later serve to improve our character and our combat arsenal once we return to camp. The missions have a time to finish -we will fail- and we also have three lives that if they end, we will fail the same.
The title is designed to be enjoyed especially in company . One of the great hooks that has is that in addition to the local mode with a four- player split screen , we can also create public or private online games where players from all over the world are added. Taking into account the open structure of the phases, we can go where we want and do not have a linear development, another of
the successes is that the players do not have to be in the same plane. Each one can go on their own and thus, for example, divide the tasks. Of course, making a call if the others are not close and do not have or do not use voice chat can become complicated in the distance.
If to all this we add that the game gives us missions by rank, and that we are going up in rank as we advance, the result is that there are dozens and dozens of missions (some seventy) to complete. Rich in content, good multiplayer and personalization … what then fails Mercernary Kings? In that playable developmentIt does not end up being as varied as one could expect.
The missions are based on rescuing a specific number of hostages, ending certain specific enemies, hunting animals, finishing with final bosses … but they all end up reducing themselves to repeating mechanics over and over again, with very similar enemies, level distribution almost traced in many cases. When we carry more than twenty missions we will feel that the following ones become somewhat heavy and repetitive because they are very similar.
In addition, the design of levels can be improved. The title promotes exploration and we will move on different planes , entering doors that take us to other places and continue our exploration. But the structures are very similar to each other.
Also in the artistic and visual, something that does not help to feel the sense of variety so necessary when a title proposes to play so many missions. In general the bet is good, better in cooperative, but the development of it is what definitely takes away from being a much larger experience.
