Mercenaries

By Hardcore

Mercenaries™ is no picnic. You're thrown into a war-torn region set in an unstable rogue nation that has powerful weapons of mass destruction—and at least four armies fighting to control it.

You have plenty of military hardware to play with, but you have to earn the right to use them by playing each of the dangerous factions off one another. It's a monumental task, but there are ways to crank up the difficulty even higher.

Meet one bad Swede.

Start things off right by choosing Mattias Nilsson as your character. There's nothing wrong with Mattias (apart from his scary dead voice and the sociopathic things he says), but his speed advantage simply isn't as useful as Chris Jacob's damage resistance or Jennifer Mui's stealth training.

By definition, Mattias will take more damage from enemy fire than Jacobs, and the bad guys will see him coming a lot sooner than they see Mui, so choosing Mattias means you're going to experience more combat and take more damage than the other two mercenaries—just the way we hardcore types like it.

Since the Sniper Rifle is one of the most useful tools in the game, we're going to be doing without it. Your preferred two-weapon combination helps determine how you approach each new challenge, and for us, we're going to go with the RPG-Shotgun combo. This lets you do major damage from a distance or up close, but the RPG's limited ammo and the shotgun's limited range mean you're going to have to use your weapons carefully, especially in large-scale battles where you're dreadfully outnumbered.

You'll have to wait for the shotgun because you don't have the option of getting it in a supply drop until you're about halfway through the Clubs in the Deck of 52. In the meantime, you can take one off of the guys guarding the Five of Clubs. If that's not possible, the standard Carbine and Assault Rifle are both acceptable substitutes. They don't have the close-range punch of the shotgun, but they're much more effective at mid- and long-range.

Ramp up the chaos.

The one thing you can do to make the game as challenging as possible is stick with one faction as much as possible (and make sure it's not the Russian Mafia). You'll have to do jobs for each faction during the opening part of the game, when you're hunting the clubs from the Deck of 52, but beyond that bare minimum, you should try to put all your eggs in one basket.

Let's say you choose to work with the Chinese and let all the other factions bear whatever grudges they want. This means that every non-Chinese soldier is going to start shooting as soon as they see you, which turns quick drives across town into bloody gauntlets that force you to fight for every inch of road.

You won't even be able to visit faction headquarters without the sentries trying to pop a cap in your butt and the doorman extorting a $25,000 bribe just to get you through the door. This constant combat combined with such a serious drain on your finances can only make it tougher to succeed—but hardcore gamers can take it.

Alienating the Mafia is a major headache all by itself because, if the Russians hate you, then the Merchant of Menace is also off-limits without a bribe. No supply drops in the field means you have to make do with only what you have and what you can steal.

Swapping your empty weapon with a fallen enemy's leaves you vulnerable while you're doing it, but it's the only way to stay on the offensive without that resupply chopper. Between the hostile factions hounding you and the lack of mid-mission support, you will truly feel like a lone soldier battling impossible odds while you try to earn your fortune.

Move over and let Mattias drive.

There's one final way to makeMercenaries as tough as possible: Avoid using vehicles whenever possible. Covering ground on foot takes a very long time, even with Mattias' speed, so you shouldn't torture yourself by running all the way across the map. But, once the shooting starts or the target has been sighted, you should bail on your ride and give the enemy some personal attention.

Some missions are vehicle-based and some require you to trespass on enemy territory (certain death if you're not disguised in the right vehicle), so you can make some exceptions to this rule. On the whole, however, vehicles are an incredibly valuable asset and going without them means you have to fill a very big hole in your strategy, especially when your strategy is combat-heavy (as Mattias' must be, according to how we've laid this out).

You can succeed in Mercenaries any number of ways. My Hardcore handicaps won't make it any easier for you, but they will force you to discover new ways of bringing home the bounty—something every great "sandbox" game should do.