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Mercenary Kings
PC (Steam)
A Better Way to Loot & Shoot
4.5/5 stars
“Mercenary Kings” (“MK”) is the second title by Indie developer, Tribute Games, whose previous work, a weird “Breakout” clone called “Wizorb,” was one of a handful of games to grace the now-fully-deceased OUYA Indie console. “MK” itself was a Kickstarter-backed project and collaboration with Australian animator, Paul Robertson, of ‘Scott Pilgrim’ fame. After nearly a year of development, Tribute brought the game out of Early Access, and the final result is certainly impressive.
Presentation
Because of the collaboration with Paul Robertson on the project, “MK” has a very unique, iconic look. The game is entirely 2D sprites and is viewed from a sidescrolling perspective. All of the characters and enemies are portrayed in Robertson’s unique, cartoony style, with big heads, short limbs, and distinctive facial features. The animations for the individual sprites are incredibly well done and very detailed, whether the character in question is a normal person or a gigantic boss enemy.
The audio is quite pleasant as well. The soundtrack attempts to emulate the chiptunes of the 8-bit era, but with slightly higher fidelity. There are a number of catchy, memorable tunes, and several of the game’s boss encounters have unique music instead of recycling the generic boss theme. For a Kickstarted Indie game, it’s surprising that “MK” has any voiceacting at all, but it does. Each of the two playable characters can spout a few canned phrases to aid in mic-less communications in multi-player, plus they have a few quips that they spout during normal gameplay, providing a boost to the characters’ personalities.
Technically, “MK” is pretty solid, and Tribute has done a good job of issuing patches in a timely manner as issues pop-up. I have sometimes had difficulty getting the game to work with an XBONE controller, but I think that’s more of a Microsoft/XBONE problem than a Tribute/“MK” problem. Currently the game has an annoying bug that was introduced in the latest patch that frequently causes the ‘level complete’ jingle to play multiple times before the game actually flashes the ‘Mission Complete’ graphic and returns the player to the level hub. It’s not game breaking, nor does it really have any negative consequences, but it wasn’t there for the majority of time I spent with the game.
Story
“MK” is a parody of the kind of goofy Secret Government Agency vs. Evil Organization stories we used to see all the time in Spy-Fi movies and novels. Much like ‘James Bond’s’ MI6 vs. SPECTRE or ‘Get Smart’s’ CONTROL vs. KAOS, the characters in “MK” are members of the titular government-funded agency, the Mercenary Kings, and are fighting an ongoing world-wide war against the nefarious forces of CLAW.
In “MK,” the Kings are pulled into a conflict with CLAW on a remote tropical island, Mandrake Island, where a secret government research facility is working to extract incredible, semi-magical capabilities from the local plant life (tiny, waddling, turnip-like creatures that, unsurprisingly, belong on the list of videogame characters that remind me of Chris). CLAW manages to pull off a devastating surprise attack that wipes out all five members of the Mercenary Kings, but a scientist named Bluebell manages to bring two of them, Empress and King, back to life using Mandrake Formula, which eventually becomes the game’s main McGuffin.
The back and forth and obvious bad blood between the leader of the Kings and the leader of CLAW provides some amusing drama. Likewise, the story is full of numerous twists and turns as it plays out over 10 Ranks, each with 11 Missions (plus the Final Boss), with changing objectives, character development, and sometimes predictable revelations.
Determining game length is no easy feat with regard to “MK,” as its gameplay mechanics allow for a lot of voluntary repetition. It’s possible to blow through the game in roughly 30-35 hours without taking any time to savor it. I, personally, clocked nearly 90 hours in pursuit of speedrun times for every mission, materials for my custom loadout, and generally enjoying myself. Whether just dipping in a toe or jumping in feet-first, “MK” provides a lot of enjoyment for the price.
Gameplay
Many people look at screenshots or videos of “MK” and say, ‘ZOMG, a new ‘Metal Slug’ clone! BUY!’ But then they’re disappointed and angry because “MK” really isn’t like ‘Metal Slug’ at all. See, “MK” isn’t really a run-and-gun or SHMUP-style game at all. It’s closer to a ‘Mega Man’ style 2D platformer with pattern-based boss battles.
However, the key selling point in “MK” isn’t the platforming or even the shooting. It’s the customization. “MK” features the kind of gun-building, loadout-customizing mechanics I would really, really like to see applied to the ‘Borderlands’ franchise. Instead of finding random guns, knives, and biological mods as they kill enemies, the characters in “MK” find crafting materials. By taking these materials in specific quantities to the NPCs that inhabit the Kings’ base camp, players can pay in-game dollars (which themselves are earned by completing missions without dying) to craft gear based on recipes, with more recipes made available at each Rank. But that’s not all! Every gun in the game consists of a receiver, barrel, magazine, sight, stock, and ammo – all of which can be mixed-and-matched in order to create a huge variety of weapons to meet any player’s specific criteria. Do you want armor piercing bullets? You can do that. Do you want shotguns that spray pellets instead of a single slug? You can do that too. Do you want heat-seeking missiles? You can also do that. Do you want a shotgun that fires swarms of tiny heat-seeking missiles instead of pellets? You can even do that! Eventually! Even better, the game has no hokey leveling system, which means that character stats and guns stats are static – barring upgrades – which makes it much easier for players who only play a little and players who play a lot to join-up in co-op mode without a massive imbalance of power.
I love the crafting system in “MK,” and I spent a lot more time than the other MJ Crew members replaying stages in order to farm materials and money so I could test out a variety of weapon types. I always ended up falling-back on shotguns of some variety, though.
In addition to gun-crafting, players can customize their melee weapon and outfit their character with up to two biological mods. Mods provide a variety of passive ability boosts, but often come with negative side effects. There are a huge number of them available, but I generally found that Cure, which provides slow health regen with a 10% gun damage nerf, and Dodger+, which makes characters invincible while dodge-rolling, are essential enough that none of the others matter.
Character loadouts also take weight into consideration. Every gun part, every knife, every mod, and every consumable item has a weight, which are all added together to determine the character’s weight class, ranging from Fast to Very Slow. I found that it generally very difficult to keep characters from being overly heavy, which affects their movement speed (when not rolling) and their ability to jump properly (which makes platforming more difficult as characters get heavier).
Missions in “MK” are all timed affairs, and many of them take place in the same environments. Personally, I appreciated the game re-using stages as the backdrop for numerous missions, as it allows for the stages to be bigger and more elaborate, with players only exploring a portion of a stage for a given mission. It also lowers the burden of memorizing stage layouts.
There are only two small negatives that I didn’t appreciate regarding “MK’s” gameplay. First, enemies respawn FAR too quickly when the player scrolls their screen. I know the game was designed with a strong 8-bit influence, but there’s a reason that kind of rapid respawning for generic baddies went out of style.
The biggest issue I have with the game, though, is the fact that it is supposed to be a very co-op centric multi-player experience with drop-in/drop-out support for up to four friends… yet the game is decidedly more fun as a single-player experience due to the way enemies scale in power as more players join the team. With one or two players, enemies are easy to kill. Players can spread out across the map in order to take care of multiple objectives simultaneously. However, with three or four players, enemy health scales up so high that it takes a long time to kill regular enemies and a ridiculously long time to kill boss enemies… who will frequently run away and hide in one of several boss rooms in most missions if the players fail to kill them fast enough. In three or four player games, everyone needs to be as skilled as the best player and everyone needs to stick together in order to deal enough damage to enemies in a short amount of time. And when everyone is filling the air with bullets during a boss fight, suddenly dodging the boss’ own attacks becomes increasingly impossible due to the visual clutter.
Even worse, when playing single-player, the player has 3 lives for each mission. Losing a life results in a deduction to the reward money paid-out at the end of the stage. In a multi-player game, all players share the same pool of 3 lives… AND they divide the reward money between them!
Overall
“Mercenary Kings” is a fantastic, retro take on the shoot & loot formula that the ‘Borderlands’ franchise made popular, but with more refined customization features that give the player more control than the RNG over what weapons they use. It provides a lot of goofy, stylish fun for up to four friends, but is, unfortunately, more fun as a solo experience.
Presentation: 4.5/5
Story: 4.5/5
Gameplay: 4.5/5
Overall (not an average): 4.5/5
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