This game had kind of been sitting on the back burner for a while. After playing through the first half of GTA IV (I’ve never finished it) and feeling largely underwhelmed, it kind of left a bad taste in my mouth in regards to sandbox games. I then played Far Cry 2, another sandbox game but in first person, and while it was good it suffered from GTA IV’s same crippling problem, and that was having all this freedom and nothing really to do with it. It’s all well and good being able to walk around a seemingly infinite world, but if all I can do is smell the virtual roses then what is the point? Admittedly there is more to do than this, but the list of possible activities is quite short (steal generic vehicle, buy weapon, blow stuff up). I think what a lot of these sandbox games missed the point on was that player doesn’t want the same freedom as the real world, they want complete freedom to do whatever they want, whenever they want, and for it to be, numero uno,  Fun with a capital “F”.

In this regard I think Mercenaries 2 succeeded. From the start you aren’t given any inclination that this is going to be a serious game. The lead protagonist is a Mercenary, named Mattias Nielson (who looks suspiciously like the Techno Viking),  who blows stuff up for the right price. Some guy hired him to do a job and then tried to kill him, but instead shot him in the ass. So you spend the game trying to hunt down this guy who shot you in the ass. It’s not going to win any Oscars for its dialogue or plot, but what it is is cheesy and fun. Right out of the gate you are given a semi-auto grenade launcher, then you are given access to a satellite to drop a bomb on a fortified gate, you are then given a Tank to lay waste to an entire compound of destructible buildings. This opening tutorial level really sets the tone for the game, in that you can do whatever you want in this world, however you want. Gone are the usual sandbox meager beginnings where you have to scratch in the dirt for ammo for your pistol.

Albeit, you do have to work your way up in standing and what you can buy after this tutorial, but at no point do you feel you are in a world with nothing to do. To find the man that shot you, Solano, you have to become friends with competing factions in Venezuela, work for them and get their trust before they will give you information about his whereabouts, as each of these factions are in competition you have to balance what work you will do for them, as helping one faction might make the other angry at you. Think of the movie “A fistfull of Dollars”, you play Clint Eastwoods character.

The work you do for each faction is also fairly varied, there are the usual straightforward side missions such as “blow up this building” or “capture this guy”, but on top of this there are some race levels with cars, boats or helicopters, or delivery missions where you have to deliver medicine or chickens without them flying out of the back of your truck. It’s varied enough to keep it interesting, and the rewards you receive for completing them always justify them.

Which leads to what impressed me most about this game. The world is quite expansive, but not the biggest I’ve seen, and the graphics are pretty good, but not ground breaking, but what impressed me the most is the sheer number of interactable vehicles, weapons and usable airstrikes in the game. From the start you recruit an Irish Helicopter pilot, then a mechanic who builds specialized vehicles (although she is rarely needed) and then a Russian jet pilot. Once recruited you can get vehicles or weapons you have purchased from faction shops delivered to you, or you can call in airstrikes on enemy locations. If you don’t have the resources for these, you can simply steal any vehicle, whether boat, helicopter, car or tank, or pick up any enemies weapon. This is not unique to this game as it is pretty much a stapple of all sandbox games, what separated this one though was the sheer variety to choose from. I don’t think I used one vehicle more than once before finding a bigger, faster or more armed to the teeth alternative.

That being said I tended to stick to the variety of helicopters the most and didn’t even scratch the surface on the plethora of available civilian vehicles or boats. Also, with weapons, I tended to mainly stick to what I picked up off of the enemies. You could spend days just trying to use each and every one of the weapons and vehicles available in this game. Further to this are the variety of airstrikes, one of the most satisfying parts of the game, as they just keep getting bigger, brighter and more explosive the further into the game you get. Ending with you getting your hands on a Nuclear Bunker Buster. Very few games have pulled off the Nuclear explosion well. Mercenaries 2 can be added to the list that has. I won’t try to explain it, rather I’ve recorded a video of it in use below.

Overall I was satisfied with this game. From start to finish I found it fun. I never felt like I was retreading the same ground, or approaching a mission the same way too often. The varying strengths and weaknesses of each vehicle you got meant you had to re-evaluate each mission to see how best to approach it (i.e. I want to steal that fuel and kidnap that person, so I can’t use missiles as they are too indirect and might blow up the fuel tanks, I will have to use laser guided bombs, sniper rifles and surgical airstrikes… etc) The main plot is quite short and there are no real options for buying personal armour for Mattias, which makes you feel naked when you are outside of a vehicle, but there are not enough gripes about this game to make me not like it. It has restored my faith in the sandbox genre, now hopefully Rockstar can follow suit and take a leaf out of Mercenaries 2′s book for GTAV

**Go to the Vimeo to watch the clip in HD**