With The Saboteur now on Steam, it's time to bring back Pandemic's true masterpiece and properly do the EA-shuttered studio justice

GamesThird Person ShooterWith The Saboteur now on Steam, it’s time to bring back Pandemic’s true masterpiece and properly do the EA-shuttered studio justiceWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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(Image credit: LucasArts)

Cover art for Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction, showing the three playable characters.

They did it. They really did it. 13 years after EA took its ball and went home—starting up a Steam competitor then called Origin—its cabal of executives finally consented to release a trove of absolute classic games on Steam. Command and Conquer, Populous, Alpha Centauri. All sorts of stuff that would merit a bronze statue if they ever build thatPanthéon des jeux vidéoI keep emailing the Paris municipal council about.

But another game joined them: The Saboteur, a 2009 third-person action-adventure that saw you liberate occupied France from the Nazi war machine. It’s not an Alpha Centauri-level classic, but it’s a well-loved thing, and was the swansong for Pandemic Studios—dearly departed masters of mid-2000s sandbox mayhem—released a monthafterEA shut it down.

In fact, its Steam release got me thinking. Almost every gem in the Pandemic catalogue has been lovingly preserved and PC-ified after the studio’s passing. Some of it has even been resurrected in the form of remakes and remasters: Games like Battlefront, Battlezone 2, and Destroy All Humans. But when I said “almost” every gem has been preserved, I meant it. One jewel from the Pandemic crown is still absent on our platform of choice, and it happens to be the best of the lot.

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(Image credit: LucasArts)

Manning a turret in Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction.

It’s Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction, which remains frustratingly trapped in console jail. Sure, it’s accessible via modern Xboxes' (admittedly very cool) back-compat program but utterly inaccessible to the rest of us.

Are we truly going to let a game in which Peter Stormare totes a rocket launcher go to the dustbin of history?

The politics of a regime-change simulator were maybe a little questionable, although Mercs was generally tongue-in-cheek about the whole thing, but playing it was a joy. Every structure was destructible, you had an arsenal of ridiculous tools—bunker busters, bombing runs, that kind of thing—to call down on your enemies, and you could antagonise the CIA, which is precisely the kind of thing I’m looking for in a videogame.

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(Image credit: LucasArts)

Sniping a target in Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction.

But more than that, it’s one of the first games I remember that did something properly interesting with its open world. The Deck of 52—your hit list of targets to capture or terminate at your discretion, andvery much a product of its era—were distinct mini bosses peppered across the open world for you to stumble upon as you fled whichever faction you’d angered last.

It was excellent, a kind of precursor to the Shadow of Mordor nemesis system, and an experience which I’ve never found properly replicated in any other game. Including 2008’s Mercenaries 2: World in Flames, a sequel we’d all like to forget.

(Image credit: LucasArts)

Evacuating on a helicopter in Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction.

And, look, I’ve got nothing against Destroy All Humans, but if we’re gonna take the time to remake both games in that series I feel like we could surely find it in our hearts to bring Mercenaries back from the dead? It’s a game that’s more than worth preserving beyond consoles, and whose brand of chaos lacks any kind of substitute in modern catalogues.

Because look, you can tell me Just Cause is modern Mercenaries all you want, the lack of a Deck of 52, political intrigue, universally destructible buildings and Peter Stormare inserting a script in his mouth and chewing it makes it averypoor substitute indeed.

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The biggest gaming news, reviews and hardware deals