Indie Rock: Mercenary Kings

There’s a cat in Mercenary Kings. We’ll get to what Mercenary Kings actually is in a little bit. I want to talk about this one cat in it and it literally cannot wait. I will explode if I don’t write 200 words solely about this adorable kitty-cutie. This is a Keanu Reeves movie and I am the bus or boat or whatever.

This cat hangs out at your home base and just sort of lounges around. It is the most realistic cat I have ever seen in a game. This cat has a ridiculous number of animations and presumably thousands of lines of code which provide it with legitimate motivations and cat-based goals. If you told me that this cat was backed by sophisticated military grade artificial cat intelligence I wouldn’t even blink. That’s the kind of cat we’re talking about.

It casually walks around, or if that’s not quick enough it dashes in a hurry. When it reaches wherever it feels like going it stands there and looks around blankly (but blinking occasionally). If it’s tired it falls asleep (having a happy enough dream that it wags its tail). The cat seems to like cuddling up at the feet of stationary NPCs and will jump up onto high platforms or will plummet down to get to them. There’s deliberate and distinct animations for all of this.

You get the impression that days of effort, perhaps even weeks, were spent perfecting this one cat. The cat was probably the first part of the game to get finalised. It was probably fully drawn and scripted before the environment where it inhabits was marked down onto graph paper.

What I’m trying to say is, no one is going to accuse the developer Tribute of a lack of effort, but I’m not sure that Mercenary Kings is actually any good despite that.

For better or for worse, Mercenary Kings is Monster Hunter by way of Metal Slug. That presumably conveys “it’s a 2D shooter but with some crafting systems in it!”, and yeah, but shut up a second. It takes that same sense of design from Metal Slug, which was always about overly complex pixel art and way more frames of animation than truly necessary; Plus you shoot guns a bunch in it.

It takes even more cues from Monster Hunter, though. The way that you interact with the world is to take on a specific task (gathering certain numbers of supplies, killing a certain number of enemies, defeating a boss) from the home base and then get flown to one of about three maps. It means revisiting the same area over and over, but gradually gaining more suitable equipment each time.

I’ve been trying to figure out why this doesn’t work here, and obviously I’m concerned about definitively judging a game before it’s technically finished (I’m playing an Alpha build gained from backing the kickstarter). The only reason I can think that this kind of structure works elsewhere and not here is that the world’s only 2D.

Two missions were frustratingly awful to play through and totally soured my experience. In the first I had to rescue a certain number of hostages scattered around the map. In the second I had to kill a certain number of Sniper-classed enemies. In both cases I reached a point where there was only one left to find, but didn’t manage before the time ran out. I was back-tracking constantly and searching the same areas over and over but it was unclear where I needed to look in order to find one single unit.

This sort of thing works in Monster Hunter because getting a cursory view of an entire area is far easier, you duck into a new zone, rotate the camera around 360 degrees as you run to another exit. In Mercenary Kings you fight through waves of respawning enemies in your way as you scour every inch of the map without shortcut. You can only see what’s contained within the screen, meaning you can’t look around to see if it’s necessary to head over somewhere.

It wouldn’t be fitting for the game to include a directional arrow because that removes any sense of player discovery and would just be going to wherever you’re told, but the alternative is no fun either.

Mercenary Kings might just be too ambitious. Initially I felt like they were pitching a fairly linear but beautiful side scroller that acted as an homage to classic shooters like Contra, but had systems in place which let you create your own perfect weapon for your own playstyle. I appreciate that Tribute have made an attempt to go beyond that, but their efforts to do so feel like they’ve created a game which doesn’t really work and is far more frustrating than necessary.

That cat, though, is way worth the price of admission.

Oh, Also

Experiment 12 is as fascinating as it is uncomfortable. I don’t have a whole lot to say about it yet other than I love the ideas it’s offering, if not the way it’s making me feel. I’m playing it in very short bursts because I may have a heart attack.

It’s a collection of games which continue the same themes, if not directly follow on from each other. It’s been built by a bunch of names you should have heard of already like Terry Cavanagh, Jasper Byrne, Richard Perrin, Michael Brough, Robert Yang and Alan Hazelden. It’s also free, so, shove this video game in your head, you idiot!