Review of the Revived MMO Title 9mm Online(Mercenary Wars)

The resurrection of the fallen mmos is upon us brothers and sisters, yet another fallen has been risen by the power of new owners. Okay, enough of that. What I am getting at is another game has been revived, this time Mercenary Wars, which is now going by the name of 9mm Online. The new re-invention of the game is brought to us by Funizen, and I have been tasked at giving this game a look to see how she runs and compares with others out there.

9mm Online - Combat Video

Jumping into my first match, and do the currently low playerbase I found out that the game does feature bots. No not the kind that prick players use to get an advantage due to their lack of skill, but ones to use to fill a room or just get some practice time in. They only seem to be available in the Mercenary Team Death Match mode, but it is nice and keeps the room alive when real players aren't available. You can also set their difficulty to various settings, from a more newbie mode, to heroic. The bad thing is, even on Heroic, they barely offer a challenge still. The reason I do like this, is that this is a feature that is not seen enough in shooters, especially free ones, and it does at least offer some way for players to practice without diving into matches all of the time.

Another feature that actually caught my eye, and I would love to see in other online shooters I play, is a combo countdown. Okay, maybe the wording isn't perfect, but what I meant by it is you know when you're in a game and you get a double or triple kill, but it doesn't tell you how much time you have till you run out? Well they added that to this game. Once you kill an enemy, you'll see a skull with a counter next to it on the left hand side of the screen. The counter ticks down from six and ticks down, if you get another kill it will be added to the combo, and the timer will reset. My only real gripe with the counter is that six seconds seems a bit too long, but other than that I do love actually knowing how much time I have left, and makes me rush to try to get another kill to add to it.

I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with another feature I ran into the game, which is a stat based feature. Now I didn't get to play against other players enough to determine if you get more points per level, or if it is fixed when you buy a character, since that is when I first got to distribute mine, but it is sort of neat, but also feels out of place at the same time. The stat based system you may be more familiar with in RPGs with shooter elements, the first coming to mind, Mass Effect or Alpha Protocol. In a way I guess it would be more similar, but a bit more simple than Alpha Protocol's system, because you are given points and can distribute them in different areas such as defense for a certain body area, movement speed, or even better accuracy when moving while using a certain weapon type. I say it feels out of place mostly because it isn't the type of thing you normally see in a online shooter, and being that I didn't get to dive into it too much to see how far things actually get affected, it still has me a bit uncertain.