Epic's Chinese studio shows third-person shooter Mercenary Ops
Multiplayer-focused PC game due in summer.
Epic Games' Chinese subsidiary is making a multiplayer-focused third-person shooter called Mercenary Ops for PC. It's being shown at GDC in San Francisco this week.
Mercenary Ops, powered by Unreal Engine 3 and NVIDIA physX technology, blends Counter-Strike-style gameplay with Gears of War's camera perspective and cover system. It's also somewhat reminiscent of Metal Gear Online. The artwork suggests a semi-sci-fi, near-future setting, with beefy, tooled-up modern warriors fighting on windswept platforms and giant industrial installations.
The game, published by new American publisher Delkans Publishing, is targeting a summer 2012 launch in the US and Europe, and it's intended to be a retail release. The team making it is largely composed of veterans of Ubisoft Shanghai who worked on Splinter Cell: Double Agent. It will be Epic Games China's first release.
Gameplay focuses on using the third-person camera for situational awareness - seeing around corners and over cover - and loadout management. You can carry two primary weapons, but the heavier your total loadout, the slower you will move (unlike Counter-Strike, where simply switching to your pistol enables a faster run speed). Weather effects such as a blizzard might affect visibility during a match.
Check out the trailer below.
