Owning a Vita is usually a lesson in frustration.
You know full well that you hold the most powerful handheld ever between your palms, the first device capable of delivering console-quality gaming on the go… and you’ve got nothing to play on it.
Your options are particularly limited if you want a First Person Shooter, as so many of today’s gamers do. Resistance: Burning Skies was relatively lifeless and Call of Duty Black Ops: Declassified didn’t deserve the name.
Thankfully, Killzone Mercenary finally delivers on the Vita’s unfulfilled promise – that console-quality FPSs are possible on a handheld.
The premise of Mercenary is exactly that – you play as Arran Danner, a mercenary drifting through the seemingly endless war between the ISA and the Helghast, selling your services to the highest bidder.
Money is the aim of the game, and it saturates your experience, in both the game’s single player and multiplayer modes. Cash amounts are constantly popping up on screen; you earn that dollar for everything from a basic kill to picking up ammo.
Headshots, brutal melee kills and using explosives will all net you more money than filling another torso with lead, so it’s worth varying your playstyle to maximise profit.
The money you earn is omnipresent, and provides the backbone for Mercenary regardless of what you’re doing. It acts as your experience points for ranking up, which unlocks extra slots for different loadouts in multiplayer. It’s also how you unlock new weapons; available simultaneously in single player and multiplayer from a dubious arms dealer named Blackjack, there’s a fairly standard selection of snipers, SMGs and rocket launchers available.
Those used to the huge level of customisation available in CoD and Battlefield will be slightly disappointed, as certain weapons are fixed with silencers and red dot sights, with no option to customise them.
Of course, it wouldn’t matter what sort of gun you were wielding if the controls weren’t up to scratch. Getting used to the frenetic action of a FPS on a small screen and smaller analogue sticks will take a slight adjustment period, but the option to change sensitivity settings certainly speed up the process.
Aiming and shooting both feel responsive, to the point where you’ll never be cursing the controls for a missed shot.
The main sore point with the control scheme is a side effect of the Vita not having as many buttons as a Dualshock. Pressing Circle whilst still makes you crouch, whereas pressing it whilst moving makes you sprint… this is understandably a bit fiddly, and occasionally you’ll sprint into cover and get shot to pieces rather than crouching behind it.
The tight gameplay is displayed adequately during the game’s short campaign. There aren’t quite as many set-pieces as a modern FPS fan might expect, but missions are fun and well-designed. It never feels too repetitive despite the majority of environments being fairly enclosed due to the Vita’s small screen, and the story of your money-loving band or mercenaries is well-told with some solid voice acting.
The campaign is brief, but the online offering should last you weeks. With three modes across six maps all supporting up to eight players, the online multiplayer is robust, and arguably the best of its kind on a handheld. The action is fast and the framerate remains smooth throughout, with the majority of connectivity issues solved by a heft Day One patch.
The pick of the online modes is Killzone’s staple offering Warzone, in which players compete over a shifting set of objectives on one map. Though a game will take you a good 20 mins, over that time you’ll kill people to collect their Valour cards, hack terminals that fall from the sky offering powerful, Killstreak-esque bonuses, wound players and interrogate them for information, and finally go all out and rack up the kills at the end of the round.
It’s entertaining and unpredictable, with the most kills rarely meaning the most points.
On top of Warzone, Valour cards are extra online incentives. Each day, you are assigned a card based on your performance the last time you played the game. It can go down as well as up, so you’ll need to play consistently well to maintain your rating as an Ace. Every time you kill an opponent online they drop their Valour card, and the challenge of collecting a deck of 52 should keep you playing that little while longer.
Killzone Mercenary isn’t perfect, by any means, but it is nonetheless a statement of intent for the Vita.
For a handheld game it’s a graphical marvel, and its online multiplayer is both fun and incentivised enough to keep you playing. What you’ll remember from playing it though, is something far more simple – it just works. You’re playing a bona fide First Person Shooter on something you can take on the bus – or into the lecture theatre, if you’re a carefree first year.
Mercenary proves that not only is console-quality gaming possible on the go, but playing a proper FPS is as well. And that’s quite a big deal.
4.5/5
Jon Jenner, Exeposé Editor
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