The adventure begins once you pick a mercenary: either Empress or King, who recently perished in a catastrophic battle against a military organization called CLAW. Both heroes are now alive thanks to experimental science made possible by the Mandragora Project (named after the lush jungle island where the research lab was built). Their enemies hope to use that same precious knowledge not to save lives, but to usher in a horrifying new world that makes the current population superfluous. There are some surprisingly dark themes, offset by cartoony artwork and a fast-paced soundtrack that keep it all from becoming depressing.
A typical stage offers you 15 to 30 minutes to do your damage, but you rarely need that much time. You can bring only a limited number of supplies with you from camp, and you generally need to fill up half your space with C4 or shock bombs, so the real challenge is resource management. You can call in support crates a couple of times per stage, but it's best to save those for emergency situations, such as when you need still more explosives to blast through arbitrary barriers that sometimes await you. For health recovery, you should instead seek out the infirmaries that serve as checkpoints and safe zones. You recuperate while you wait. As you improve your armor, the time required to fill a drained life meter extends past a full minute. There's no option to considerably speed up the pace, either, even if you're prepared to occupy one of your two precious passive ability slots with a regenerative skill.
A paltry 10 core missions walk you along the path to the closing credits, but you spend much of the 40 or 50 hours navigating overly similar corridors and engaging palette-swapped adversaries.The good news is that when you're playing well and have learned how stages and enemies function, it's relatively easy to go long stretches without taking damage, provided you're patient. Early on, you can almost always avoid enemy shots by simply ducking, or you can deflect them with a well-timed thrust of your chosen blade. A lot of maps also feature showdowns with minibosses or your primary target, but it's easy to learn and predict their attack patterns. Things only get difficult if you let yourself hurry, because then it's common to make costly mistakes.
Mercenary Kings becomes more manageable as you progress. When you first start playing, there's a lot to keep track of, and you might not even realize you have some of the resources you do. The developers don't spend much time introducing you to the basics, which is nice because it allows you to jump right in and start causing mayhem in the name of justice, but you need to pay close attention to the various systems at play. If you don't, you're in for a miserable time and probably missing about half of the game's appeal.
Even the promising multiplayer mode has unfortunate drawbacks. Unless you're playing with a friend, it's difficult to know what to expect. You could easily meet someone who doesn't understand the game like you do, which is frustrating if he or she then shoots a captive you were supposed to free or exterminates a boss the mission clearly calls for you to capture. Voice chat isn't supported, which could have allowed some much-needed communication. Instead, there are text phrases you can select with your controller, though no option for "Don't kill him, you idiot!" Additionally, cohorts who fall in combat must resume play from the last checkpoint unless you brought along an adrenaline needle instead of something more useful.
