I've been playing the closed beta. It's awesome. Now I'll tell you why/give an overview of the beta.
1. Dem Graphics
This game looks great, real great. The fact it's on Vita just makes it that much more impressive. Sure if you blow up a vita screen capture to 65" it will look worse than killzone on PS3, but per pixel and going by the feel while playing I'd say it beats Killzone 3 and is stuck in between it and Shadow Fall. It does however have some lower rez textures here and there. Not sure why since 99% of the textures are perfect.
2. Options
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Everybody loves options! The only thing that can't be changed is the button layout. Speaking of that, controls!
3. Controls
You'll notice lots of repetitive labeling. For the most part touch is optional. It's not optional for melee though!
Melee is started with triangle but must be completed with swipes. I LIKE IT. When doing melee from the front, your enemy also gets a swipe command allowing him to counter. In addition while doing any melee actions you can still be shot at which terminates your attack/defense. This gives swipes purpose. Being somewhat awkward/hard to switch from buttons to swiping is kinda the point I think. Melee is better becuase of it. So often even at point blank a gun is better than a knife.
4. Gameplay
The basic gun play itself is in between 2 and 3 while feeling a lot like halo 1-3. Enemies are somewhat bullet sponges yet easy to kill if that makes any sense. Far from being a twitch shooter. You can live a few minutes before dieing. To speed things up there is no counter after death; respawns are instant once you select a load out. Speaking of that Mercenary also gets rid of classes and instead has COD style load outs.
5. Blackjack
Spend money and buy stuff, simple as that. Store gives a discount on one item at a time and appears to change randomly. You start out with no grenedes or vanguard abilities. You need to buy those.
6. Van-Guard
You obtain vanguards two different ways; killing and orbital drops. Killing enough allows you to use the vanguard in your load out. Hacking orbital drops gives you a random vanguard that must be used that life. My favorite vanguard is the manty for obvious reasons.
It is super powerful and pretty similar in feel to Halo energy swords. Get an enemy in red and press R for an insta kill. It's a stealth drone though so only a few bullets take it down.
7. Interrogations
Now this is cool and new. Almost all modern shooters have that half dead state where you crawl around and wait for revival. Well in Mercenary you can't move in this state but the big thing is interrogations. By meleeing an enemy from behind or meleeing a downed enemy you interrogate them. This takes longer than a normal melee (two swipes) but gives you extra stuff like enemy positions. It's a cool addition and really makes it annoying when the enemy dies in your arms from crossfire as you try and beat the information out of him.
8. Valor
Just like COD kill confirmed you get extra points by running over dead enemies. What's different is these dropped cards are universal and can be picked up by anyone. It's pretty cool. You can even pick up Allie cards. Heck even pick up your own card.
9. Modes
The one on the left is death match. It lasts 10 minutes. The one on the right is team objective. 5 minutes for 5 objectives. Objectives are things like interrogate, hack, body count, etc.
What say you?
