Life of a Mercenary
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Lead a mercenary company seeking fame and fortune. Be honorable and help defend the kingdom or take contracts to those who pay the most. Rise to the top of the mercenary chain in this medieval story based around the events of The Great Tournament.
“Life of a Mercenary” is a 338,000 word interactive fantasy novel by Philip Kempton, where your choices control the story. It’s entirely text-based—without graphics or sound effects—and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.
- Play as male or female mercenary.
- An open world adventure taking place in a medieval setting.
- Unique combat and leveling system makes every game unique.
- Multiple story lines, hidden quests, and endings.
- Checkpoint system allows you to save your progress and restore to a previous point
- Choose to be an honorable or fight for whoever pays the most gold.
- Participate in war campaigns helping other nations fight off enemies.
Steam User 13
As a couch potato, I was curious about the life of a mercenary. With neither the physic nor guts to actually be a mercenary, this is as close as it gets for me. But I’m not disappointed, because this was a good read.
Writing
The characters come across as nuanced individuals with their own motivations. This is amplified through many suspenseful situations. Action, romance, mystery it’s all there. Contrary to my expectations the story didn’t shine the most in the action scenes. They were above average. The same could be said of the world building. It was the character interactions which lifted the plot up from a little above average to truly enjoyable.
I had only three gripes with the writing. If you want to play as a mercenary without morals you get shafted by the writer. Your best fighter will become disloyal and taking on shady contracts doesn’t pay enough to offset this. My second grievance is how new named fighters work. I could only occasionally take one optional fighter with me. In my whole play through my hired giant with a hammer participated in only one battle and my hired veteran in no battle at all. This makes hiring new named fighters almost useless. From the start this means you are basically stuck with 3 competent fighters as your core team forever. Other than faceless fighters like “soldier”, “guard” and “mercenary” it is impossible to grow your unit. And last but not least playing as an intelligent, wise but physically weak leader is disadvantageous. There are several in game moments, which force the main character into one-on-one fights without support.
Despite these complaints the writing quality and the amount of content is good. This alone makes it better than many other text based games on Steam.
Gameplay
A good story alone doesn’t make a good game through. And there are some problems in the actual game department. Not all stats are equally important. In my first run I chose to play as a bard. What is a bard good at? Talking to people and making hasty retreats was my guess. So I put my points in agility and diplomacy. An hour later I realized, that I shafted myself in two ways: diplomacy is only occasionally useful at best and you can upgrade your abilities through allocation of experience points. The higher a skill already is the more expensive costs the upgrade. Therefore, it’s best to put all your starting points into one single skill and use the experience points you get later to upgrade the rest. After realizing this, I started a new game. Predictably my second run was much more successful. In this second run I realized the skill distribution is not the only inconsistent aspect of the gameplay. Experience points become useless at the beginning of month two. Only paying with gold for trainers will raise stats now. No reason is given for this change.
The skills are not balanced in the least. Agility is hands down the best skill. It lets you avoid damage and also is crucial to land hits. In contrast, putting starting points into Wisdom is a waste. Wisdom checks are rare and this stat raises from itself while playing. In a complete run without training wisdom, I failed one wisdom check. The rest of the stats fall in between those two extremes. A ranking of all skills could look like this: 1. Agility 2. Agility 3. Agility 4. Strength 5. Hitpoints 6. Leadership 7. Diplomacy 8. Intelligence 9. Wisdom. Why does agility cover the first three ranks? The combat seems to rely on dice rolls. The choices between offensive, normal and defensive seem to modify chance to hit and damage rolls. So long as the PC never gets hit even minuscule amounts of damage will add up and ensure victory. With this strategy I breezed through the game. The result was maxed out fame, more than 30 000 gold to spare and the biggest mercenary band in the land. But I couldn’t feel proud to have achieved it, because the combat requires almost no skill .
Recommendation
Despite the problems in the game department I recommend this game to everyone who is up for a good read. The amount of content and the quality of the writing are more than worth the asking prize.
Edit: The review was adjusted after finishing the game.
Steam User 5
Review update to modify the bad review below: basically, you can work through things and survive, but you for some reason will be the weakest of your team and will be the one without strength or endurance no matter how hard you train or spend money on yourself. You have to work around that and not get stuck in a position in which you are at risk, which is tough for a merc. If you realize this and work around it you can have a good experience.
I was guardedly positive about Life of a Mercenary after the first run as a merc commander that led to my death. Though I could walk back through my choices and see how I might have avoided an early end, I had concerns about the decision tree, or lack of it. The dungeon scenario scotched the game for me and I have uninstalled it. The initial text frames for character setup were clear enough, but even on 'normal' difficulty you ran into too many cases where you had no choice, and your only choice clearly would end in your own demise. I knew I was dead 4 panels before my character died, due to being railroaded into a corner by the lack of choice. I know expanding the choices can exponentially increase the developer's work, and these games cannot be priced accordingly, but you do have (if the developer could see them), another option in a number of cases that can give you a good outcome w/o putting a ton of work on the developer. At best for these scenarios, you have to make your best choice, die in order to see how the scenario is set up, try again with a different character profile that better suits what you experienced the first time, and hope that the developer keeps the scenario gameplay intact and not have a fresh tree of death waiting for your new character. I once thought my personal hell, hand crafted by one of Satan's more sadistic minions, would be a Twilight Zone sendup in which I'm stuck in a room with bad wallpaper forever listening to Johnny Mathis records. It could very well be this game.
Steam User 1
Great game, is a little stretched out but if you play hosted games this is one of the good ones.
Steam User 1
this game like many of this is a medieval sim where you manege a company of fighters and fight in wars
Steam User 2
Honestly one of the best ones from them
Steam User 0
Alot of detailed and time put into the story
Steam User 2
The game is a decent amount of fun, but at the same time it is a bit of a slog to play through. Nothing really sets this story apart from most of the others you'll run into on here, but its by no means a bad game either. 6/10