Tegel's Mercenaries

Tegel's Mercenaries is a computer game developed by Mindcraft and released in 1992 for DOS. The game is an early (and poorly reviewed) entry in the strategy game subgenre of squad-based tactical command.

Background

The player controls a corporate military officer in the employ of the gruff General Tegel, and battles various criminal forces and alien threats. The player hires and equips a squad of soldiers, each of whom possesses distinct statistical combat specialties, and directs them in combat situations against various hostile humans, robots, and aliens. The game was released without several features that were described in the game's manual and in screenshots, such as intra-squad conflict stemming from divided loyalties and cybernetic upgrades to the soldiers. Furthermore, the game balance was lopsided in favor of the player thanks to poor enemy AI and overpowered weapons. In particular, the flamethrower-type weapons would often deal five times as much damage as a conventional laser weapon, which would have a much higher degree of accuracy.

A sequel, Tegel's Mercenaries 2, was solicited in the Mindscape in-house catalog that was packaged with several contemporary Mindscape games, but it never appeared. However, a direct sequel did appear in the form of Mindscape's final game, Strike Squad, a similar squad-based tactical game whose design improved on many of the shortcomings of Tegel's Mercenaries.

Plot

The game's plot follows the player's exposure of a human conspiracy that leads to a planned invasion by insectoid aliens. Ultimately, the player's squad travels to the aliens' homeworld, destroys their queen (whose design is lifted from the Alien design), and seemingly thwarts the invasion. Then, in the final cutscene, Tegel reveals himself as an alien in disguise. He was manipulating the player into assisting the aliens all along, and the final mission on their homeworld was supposed to have been a suicide mission. How the unproduced sequel would have followed up on this revelation is unknown.

Reception

While approving of Tegel's Mercenaries's graphics Computer Gaming World criticized the user interface, collision detection, and combat, calling the latter "the most frustrating aspect of the game".^[1]

References