Review #824: Killzone Mercenary

 The Vita at its finest.

 I had never played a Killzone game before, and my, oh my, what a fantastic first impression Killzone Mercenary makes! It's not just a great little game, it's also a brilliant showcase of what the Vita could've done. I've been playing a lot of Vita games that... didn't look all that great, like Mortal Kombat and Ys VI, and as good as Ridge Racer looked it struggled to maintain 30 fps. But Killzone Mercenary looks almost as good as a PS3 game, and maintains a steady framerate to boot! This is the future the Vita promised. This is what the Vita could do.

 The game pits you as mute hero Danner, a merc for hire that is currently hired to battle the Helghast, space nazies, through small skirmishes that begin with him and another buddy rescuing a ISA commander. I knew very little about the series' lore, and while the game didn't really ease me into it, I had no trouble following the story. The story is quite cliched, so much so that its twists fail to impress, but very early into the game I realized that I wasn't here for the story, I was here for the gameplay. The story's main drawback is that it's told mostly through boring de-briefing segments before each mission, working as a sort of veil while the game loads, and you can skip them as soon as the game does so. The game comes with two modes, a 9-mission long single player campaign as well as a online multiplayer component. You can replay story missions, and after beating them for the first time you gain the option to replay them with three different sets of mini missions for better money rewards, mini-missions such as scoring X amount of head shots with X gun, only using X guns, finishing the mission in under X minutes, etc. Considering that the story campaign is lengthy enough, I think it's not a bad offering.

 Mercenary follows the modern FPS blueprint to a tee, regenerating health, two weapon maximum and melee kills in one hit. That said, since you play as a Merc, the entire game is built around money. Killing enemies, and how you kill them, reward you with money, achieving certain milestones, such as killing everyone stealthily without being noticed, or using a certain type of weapon for a long time, will also reward you with money. You can then spend this money on new weapons, the only way to swap them, get new armor, get a drone or get grenades. The thing about the armament in this game... there really isn't a 'best' weapon or 'best' drone or 'best' armor, every piece of weaponry has different stats and functionality, so it's not like there's a 'best' gun. This means that it's easy to get a loadout that you really like and never change it, heck, you can do just fine with your original loadout. I never changed my armor since the starting piece was perfectly balanced with resistance and mobility. This also means that money quickly loses its purpose, and while you can use it to instantly refill your ammo and bring your drone back from its cooldown period.... you can just as easily refill your ammo from fallen enemies. This is probably why there's a small fee for re-equipping armament you already purchased.

 The game has this beautiful weight to it, running and jumping around feels so satisfying thanks to this. It also makes the game a bit more slower paced than you'd think at first glance, but I really liked it. Controls... do the best that they can. For example, since there are not L3 and R3 buttons, sprinting is done by pressing circle while moving, and crouching is done by... pressing circle while standing still. It's not ideal and may ruin your stealthy approach, but it's not awful. Being an early Vita game, it has a lot of mandatory touch controls. You can disable in-game touch button, which is neat since it cleans up the HUD, but it also means that the ammo counter is gone, because it's tied to one of these buttons. What where they thinking? I learned to live without knowing how much ammo I had left. Regardless, this doesn't do away with every touch feature. Menus are entirely touch based, but since they don't have scrolling, they work much better than they did on Ridge Racer. There are a few in-game hacking mini-games that are entirely touch based, and are quite dull to be honest, but most of them are optional. While I claimed that melee is a one-hit kill, I lied a bit, the melee button triggers a 'swipe the screen' QTE, which can fail if you swipe the wrong way. As a hater of all things touch/motion that aren't optional... I learned to tolerate them because the game was just THAT good, which is pretty much exactly like what happened with Uncharted - The Golden Abyss.

 On one hand, Killzone Mercenary is the perfect showpiece for the Vita, but on the other it's also a great first person shooter. Not only does it look amazing, it also features very satisfying gameplay, I mean, every headshot you land turns into a delicious pop of their heads. They could've gone with an upgrade system to make money matter a bit more, but I'm not complaining because the game is great as it is, and definitely one of the finest games on the system, no wonder Call of Duty and Resistance on the Vita reviewed so poorly, this game set the bar too high.
 8.0 out of 10