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When you think about it carefully enough, it isn't all that much trouble to convert a C64 game to the Plus/4 as long as sprites are not used. Well, Mercenary doesn't use sprites so the much lacking Plus/4 market is having itself tested by this well-known product.

Mercenary came out in a blaze of publicity and praise on the Commodore 64 and Atari 8-bit a few months ago, almost as a sideline from the Spectrum and Amstrad conversions it seems, this version has leaked out.

Mercenary is an Elite-type game with full 3D vector graphics in the same style, but in a completely different setting. The game starts out with your craft crash-landing on a world at war between the people on it and their robots. Your wrecked ship is in the middle of one of their cities.

As a mercenary, and a shipwrecked one at that, your mission isto destroy the mechanoids (or at least capture one of them), make as much money as possible, and escape to a spaceship capable of interstellar flight.

In the meantime you solve the game in an adventure type of way, solving puzzles and mapping out the underground complexes.

Once you have your mission and all your extra equipment, there are more buildings to protect/destroy. Baddies to fight it out with, and more complexes to explore - like the space station and colony craft.

The Plus/4 version seems identical to its Commodore and Atari ancestors, except a little faster perhaps? Maybe it's just a bit smoother.

An excellent game for the Plus/4 and one of the few that aren't just small C16 games. A must for any Plus/4 owner.