First of all I’d like to say that I loved Mercenaries, rose tinted specs firmly in place I remember fondly the destruction you could wreak and the badassedness (I just made that word up) of it all. I was therefore really looking forward to the big budget sequel, but after playing Mercs 2 for a few days several descriptive phrases kept popping into my destruction-ravaged mind. Wondering how to put into words the fact that this game does so many things right, and yet gets so many wrong. Spectacularly dull. Heroically safe. Correctly wrong. Broken refurbishment. Intelligently dumb. Precisely inaccurate. These are all expressions that come to mind when trying to describe what playing Mercs 2 is like... Dan pretty much nailed it when reviewing the PC version of Mercs 2
in comparing it to Starship Troopers (though I’d say it’s more like Starship Troopers 2). It's unpretentious and uncomplicated, filling some deep seated need a lot of us have for the occasional bout of unfettered blood-letting and explosions (in a fictional setting of course) to give us a break from our other pretentious and complicated tastes. For me, Mercenaries 2, Pandemic's new sandbox action game, is exactly the same as Troopers in this regard, minus the giant bugs, the awesome Michael Ironside and Denise Richards’ unfeasibly wide mouth.

Explosions are the meat and potatoes of Mercs 2, and the developers understand this perfectly. They've provided you with everything from grenade launcher-armed SUVs to laser-guided bunker buster bombs to even a tactical nuke, then sat back and said "go on, have a go." It pays lip service to GTA and its clones with sandbox staples like hijackable vehicles, free roaming, plentiful side missions and the occasional fiddly race-against-the-clock challenges that you could waste days of your life on. But with a near fully-destructible environment (thanks to Havok physics) and munitions liberally scattered across the Venezuelan countryside that you can collect and deploy, it’s quite clear where the game's heart really lies. Airstrikes, artillery barrages, tank busters, supply drops, vehicle drops (including APCs, boats, helicopters and tanks); all these can be called down by you in the field. Enemy trucks, tanks and even aircraft can all be hijacked (via a button-tapping minigame to overpower the driver/pilot) in the event your own ride explodes (and it will, repeatedly). In fact, it’s fair to say that nearly everything in Mercs 2 eventually explodes. Vehicles are disposable playthings, soldiers only there to provide moving targets.

As with the original Mercs, the choice of 3 characters to play as (Mattias Nilsson, Chris Jacobs or the beautiful Jennifer Mui at the start of the game may seem like a good idea, but do they really expect you to play the game through 3 times? Wouldn’t the ability to choose between the 3 for different missions have been a good idea? Or if they’d been optional intelligent AI squad mates to help you out? What's worse, it seems like every NPC in the game has to share the same four lines of dialogue, and will spout them at the slightest provocation, looping them until you bugger off or you shoot them. As this includes your support & control operative Fiona (who has an irritatingly jolly Australian accent), who is in constant radio contact with you, it’s a significantly annoying problem. The game simply doesn't have as much voice work as was clearly needed.

The menu system is a bit ham-fisted too, I found calling up a simple resource pick-up can be a finger & thumb-fumbling Mickey Mouse act as you select it, move to aim at the object (which cancels the sub menu), so you open it again and eventually manage to throw a flare 20 yards past the thing you want to have picked up. Fortunately your chopper pilot Ewan is an understanding Irish soul and will make allowances. Calling in airstrikes brings up the same problems, and potential death if you’re under fire and haven’t cleared the area completely. At times I felt less like a highly trained mercenary, and more like Stan Laurel.

There’s a whole host of other small problems to do with the difficulty and mission design but if you can come to terms with the above then you can deal with them too. Mercs 2 is, despite flashy first impressions, in a word, shoddy. It’s also a sequel, making a lot of the niggles less forgivable. Can you ultimately get over it? To an extent yes, because it still remains a jolly old jaunt when you’re pasting the enemy with cluster bombs or charging around in a tank or attack chopper, or legging it away from a huge explosion with debris and shrapnel raining around your ears. It has the good grace to remember to be fun and the sense not to take itself too seriously, I truly love the virtually limitless different ways of completing a mission. Whilst Mercs 2 never quite overcomes its handicaps, it makes the experience at its core enjoyable enough for you to forget everything for a while, and I reckon that’s what gaming is all about.