There’s really only one word to describe Pandemic Studios’ Mercenaries 2: World in Flames: explosions. Just about every gripe that you might have about this game can be rebutted with that one word. Are your eyes bleeding from the crappy graphics? Blow some stuff up and enjoy all the pretty explosions. Do you find the AI-controlled soldiers comically stupid? Fire a rocket-propelled grenade into their midst and watch the explosions toss them every which way. Are you cringing from the lame story and dialog? Call down a few airstrikes randomly to make yourself feel better.

Like its predecessor, Mercenaries 2 is a Grand Theft Auto clone, except that you’re not a two-bit hood but a grizzled mercenary and the open-world environment you’ll be gallivanting around in isn’t a metropolis, but a warzone. The game is set in a near future Venezuela (a fact which pisses off Hugo Chavez to no end) that is being fought over by various factions for its oil resources. Early on, the player is brought in to help a businessman mount a coup to take control of the country but is subsequently betrayed without being paid. This sets the stage for the player to exact his revenge, while earning a tidy profit by performing missions for the various factions vying for control of the country of course.

You can choose one of three different mercenaries as your character, each with a different special perk. Mattias Nilsson, the mohawk-sporting Swedish mercenary who appears on the game’s cover (and happens to be voiced by Peter Stormare who is perhaps best known for playing the character of mob boss John Abruzzi in the first season of Prison Break) can regenerate health more quickly, for example. The remaining two mercs can each carry more ammunition or sprint faster but other than this, the choice makes no absolutely no difference to the story. After a short (and somewhat underwhelming) introductory sequence, you’re set loose to form your own Private Military Company (PMC) and wreck your unique brand of havoc on Venezuela.

When the game begins, most of the country is controlled by the Venezuelan Army (VZ) and you can help either United Petroleum, the oil hungry megacorporation which has been cheating the country’s citizens of its oil for years, or the Marxist People’s Liberation Army of Venezuela (PLAV) to oust the VZ. Later, both the U.S., disguised as the Allied Nations (AN) faction, and China get in on the act, and there’s also a neutral Pirates faction who just want to make money. All of these factions offer the player a variety of missions to perform. Staples include sending you out to take over VZ outposts so that another faction can take it over, racing challenges that involve getting a particular vehicle or cargo from one point or another within a time limit and killing or destroying specific targets.

Each faction also has standing bounties that you can choose to do at any time. There are designated High Value Targets (HVT) who can be nabbed or killed in return for a reward (which will cause the faction the target was a member of to go hostile towards you) and designated buildings and other structures which need to be destroyed. The members of your PMC offer various challenges which test your skills at things like driving, sniping, blowing stuff up with grenades and piloting a helicopter. All of this make Mercenaries 2 a decidedly non-linear game. You’re free to roam about the countryside and do anything that you find interesting there.

So far, so similar to Grand Theft Auto, right? Here’s where the innovations come in. First, once you’ve recruited a helicopter pilot into your PMC, instead of hoofing it or driving your own vehicle to get around the huge map, you can simply call for a chopper. This will enable you to be instantly transported out of danger back to your PMC headquarters for a small fee or to get to any outpost that you’ve unlocked for any faction who are friendly to you. This is a huge time-saver as you might expect, and it’s a great reward for unlocking lots of outposts all over the map and managing to stay friendly with the factions that own them.

Second, instead of picking up weapons from the map or buying them in stores, most of your gear is bought from the factions you work for and then stored at a huge stockpile in your PMC. When you find that you need a specific piece of equipment while out in the field, you just call for it and your chopper pilot air-drops it to you to pick up. There are few things more satisfying in life than having a portable anti-air missile delivered right in front of you when you’re being buzzed by an attack helicopter. Except for choosing to air-drop an Armoured Personnel Carrier (APC) with anti-aircraft guns and missiles instead.

That’s because vehicles can be purchased for your stockpile from friendly factions and air-dropped in the same way. These include everything from cars and bikes to mobile artillery pieces and battle tanks to water skimmers and patrol boats to transport and assault helicopters (for the choppers though your pilot simply brings the vehicle to your location and then travels back to HQ on his own). Other vehicles that you find while out in the world can also be hijacked and taken over though you’ll need to play a QTE mini-game to successfully take over armed vehicles, the difficulty of which goes up according to how powerful the vehicle is. Even helicopters in flight can be hijacked in this way using a grappling gun. Unfortunately, you can’t choose to store vehicles from the world back into your stockpile, so they’re completely disposable items.

Finally, you can purchase and launch airstrikes at designated targets. Again, there are a huge variety of them. Artillery strikes and cruise missiles are shot directly from your PMC to the target, for example, while bombs are delivered from a jet, once you’ve recruited a jet pilot. You can choose specific airstrikes to defeat specific enemies: a tank-buster for example to clear an area of tanks or a cluster bomb to take out infantry and light vehicles. You can even order your pilot to do a combat air patrol, which will destroy all enemy helicopters in your area. All of these services cost money to purchase for your stockpile but you also need to spend fuel to have them carried out, so stealing fuel and upgrading the fuel storage facilities back at your PMC is a priority.

Of course, your vast arsenal would be useless if there’s nothing to use it on, so gamers will be happy to learn that everything in Mercenaries 2 is destructible. This isn’t just about exploding vehicles and huts and collapsible trees and billboards either, because everything really is destructible. Building complexes, fuel tankers, oil rigs and even gigantic skyscrapers can be reduced to rubble with the application of sufficient firepower. Blowing stuff up in big explosions not only causes a blinding flash that fills the whole screen but also sends debris flying all over the place. Taking out a building, for example, can cause pieces of torn walls tumbling down on you if you’re not careful.

All of this makes this sound like a fantastic game, and while it’s hugely satisfying to play if you grok the genre, there’s no arguing against the fact that the game is full of horrendous glitches and poor production quality throughout. The graphics for one are passable at best, and at their worst, well, look like they might have escaped from a Playstation 2 game. Odd glitches abound. It’s not unusual to notice that a stack of crates seem to be floating a few feet off the ground and sometimes during the QTE hijacking cutscenes, the background turns into a blurry mess of low-resolution pixels. As for the voicework, even with stars like Peter Stormare and Jennifer Hale on board, there is far too little variety. Plenty of reviewers have complained about hearing the same handful of voiced messages again, and again and again.

As I’ve mentioned earlier, the enemy AI is a joke. They’re so stupid that seeing enemy soldiers falling to their deaths in droves while trying to get to you from a high place is a common sight. You can honk your horn while driving a vehicle to fill it up with friendly soldiers, but they’re so ineffective that at best, they’ll only be a distraction for a couple of seconds. AI-driven vehicles regularly run into each other and get stuck when they can’t figure out how to extricate themselves from a huge pile of vehicles all jammed together. Despite this the game manages to be challenging because it’s not afraid to throw hordes of endlessly respawning rocket-firing soldiers at you.

My final verdict: if you liked the Grand Theft Auto games for the free-form carnage and mayhem of the earlier titles in the series and are willing to overlook its many issues, then this is the perfect game for you. If you’re looking for anything resembling a realistic shooter then walk away right now, because the only realism that this game does is the Rambo-style craziness of one person taking on a whole army straight on.