Mercenaries have received a pretty bad rap in recent years as Private Military Companies are revealed to be corrupt and dangerous organisations run by psychopaths. But along with the ninja and plumber, the mercenary makes up one of the cornerstones of the gaming universe. Mercenaries 2: World in Flames is a love song to that gaming universe hero.

The sequel to the underrated Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction, in which you levelled North Korea, Mercenaries 2 is instead set in sunny Venezuela. A combination of military coup and available oil has created ideal operating conditions for your mercenary team to earn some cash. Like its predecessor Mercenaries 2 is a sandbox GTA styled game; in other words any vehicle that passes you buy can be hijacked. A fun addition to Mercenaries 2 is that hijacking occupied military vehicles requires some quick moves and button pressing to be successful and these quick time events can be pretty amusing.

Mercenaries 2 also sees the addition of a magnetic winch gun to hijack helicopters, a difficult feat in the original game. It’s even possible to hijack a helicopter while leaping from another one as it explodes. Jacking vehicles is really essential for beating most missions. You can expect to go from motorbike to tank, then straight to a helicopter in the course of a single mission. All the while leaving smoking wreckage, dead bodies and burning jungle in your wake.

While early missions seem linear, once you have expanded your arsenal and hired a few additional mercenaries to provide airlifts and missile strikes, you can start tackling objectives any way you choose. Venezuela has several armed groups at odds with each other and in addition to story missions for the various factions each will have a number of targets they want you to assassinate or capture, buildings they want demolished, and outposts they want captured. Many of these side missions involve assaulting a faction you may be friendly with. Attacking them can result in your standing going from friendly to hostile pretty quickly, increasing the number of regions you’ll be immediately attacked in. It’s a careful balancing act to tackle the side missions and maintain your good standing, but the benefits, such as faction vehicles, plus a location to quick travel to, outweigh the dangers. Your mercenary buddies also offer several challenge missions that can net you some unique vehicles and equipment.

Adding a friend to the mix via online coop literally doubles the fun; you can use vehicles with weapon emplacements together or tackle targets from separate directions. Some of the unlockable vehicles even cater towards coop, such as a motorbike with a gun mounted side car. With all the options available the fun level of coop is only limited by your imagination. The single downside of playing coop is when using civilian vehicles the passenger has nothing to do. But really, given the choice of an Apache helicopter or a tank over a Volkswagen minibus, what would you choose?

Unfortunately Mercenaries 2 isn’t without its flaws. It isn’t a pretty game graphics wise, lacking even a day/night cycle, and pale’s in comparison to GTA IV or Saints Row. The voice acting can be extremely grating, especially your liaison Fiona who seemingly repeats the same phrase over and over at five minute intervals. The mechanism for actually buying items is a nuisance and far too complicated, it actually adds two extra steps to the same system that existed in Mercenaries which seems pointless. The enemies are moronic cannon fodder, not such a draw back except that they spawn endlessly. This wouldn’t be a problem if there was some reward for killing millions of bad guys but there isn’t and they quickly become annoying rather than enjoyable opponents. The lack of realism in regards to your characters invulnerability, surviving tank shells to the face and drops from helicopters, also detracts from the fun. A lot of the game just doesn’t feel like it was play tested enough and poor vehicle physics make some missions knuckle bitingly annoying.

Yet all these problems seem to evaporate when you see a nuclear missile strike a bunker and watch it collapse beneath a mushroom cloud. Mercenaries 2 may be technically shoddy, shameful considering the ten month delay, but when you are really in the thick of the action, rejoicing in the variety of the sandbox environment, it can be one of the most exciting and enjoyable games on the Xbox 360.