"Aaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrgggggggghhhhh"!

Did you hear that?

That was the sound of a Mercenary. It's a cry filled with joy and frustration in almost equal parts. The outburst of someone drunk on their virtual superhuman powers of destruction and indestructibility but at the same time enraged by the limits that the world they inhabit has placed upon them. Because what Mercenaries 2: World in Flames gives with one hand, it takes away with the other, and ends up being an undeniably fun game in short measures but also a confused and glitchy one whose entertainment value is severely watered down as a consequence.

Following the critical praise the original Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction, received upon its release on Xbox and PS2, it's easy to see why developers Pandemic Studios have decided to mix many of the same ingredients together for the third person shooter's sequel - a storyline whose zest comes from its sharply exaggerated take on a potential international flashpoint, the salty relations between competing factions and, most importantly, the unrelenting, explosive kick of destruction. Because, when it comes to blowing things up, it's always happy hour in Mercenaries 2 - although the only cocktails here are of the Molotov variety.

In the game's opening few missions you drive a speedboat and a jeep, crash a tank through a shanty town, introduce assorted enemies to the rocket component of your rocket launcher and call in a couple of air strikes before smashing through the front gates of a waterside mansion, jumping on an enemy tank and wrestling the controls away from its driver then using its guns to finish off the remaining resistance and establishing the property as your new base of operations. It's all an intoxicating haze of violence and fun during which the game's particular brand of triple distilled chaos is comprehensively introduced.

The plot is a contrived tale of greed and revenge set in the game's geographically and politically blurred vision of Venezuela, a country that's become a bubbling still of tensions thanks to two men, Ramon Solano and General Carmona, who are busy fermenting a revolution. In the resulting power vacuum, different organisations including the army, local militia, peacekeepers, big oil, pirates and the Chinese, are all struggling for precious breathing space, fuelled by their crude lust for the nation's oil reserves. Not that your character is any better; the opposite of non-profit organisation, the only reason you've decided to hang around - besides the wealth of business opportunities - is because you were on the sore end of a Solano/Carmona double cross that you're finding hard to take sitting down.

While the story may be as stupid as it is superfluous, in the context of Mercenaries 2 these are its strongest traits. Along with Saints Row 2, World in Flames bucks the trends of realism and relative sobriety seen in many open world games of this generation. It's a long way from the thespian yearnings of GTA IV and a far cry too from, well, Far Cry 2. It's a game that's meant to appear shallow and it's at its most enjoyable when it best harnesses the cartoon levels of freedom and excess that it allows.

The version of Venezuela that Mercs 2 presents is one that's been distorted into almost the ultimate cliché of an unstable South American state; a wild, sun-worn, collage of a place where ugly manmade features sit uncomfortably in the lap of the natural beauty of forests, mountains, lakes and rivers. Around almost every corner you'll run into skirmishes between rival forces and, in crumbling cities like Merida, the air is choked with smoke and flaming debris. It's a world in which you'd expect nothing less, or more, than a cast of blatantly stereotypical characters - and that's exactly what you get. Your support team include your chirpy Antipodean logistics expert, the alcoholic Russian jet pilot who provides your air strike capabilities, and the guy that ferries you and your gear around in his helicopter, who's so Irish that he could be the Leprechaun love child of Michael Flatley and Daniel O'Donnell. They're all creations of the game's inherent sense of humour, an ever present characteristic that also gives you the button-pressing mini-games you undertake to capture enemy vehicles, the grappling hook you use to grab on to helicopters, the wagers you can take on from your team and the way huge piles of cash and tanks of fuel (the game's two most valuable commodities) are just left lying around for you to steal.

In order for you to join World in Flames in its indulgence in destruction, the developers have omitted any type of cover system - those are for sissies - and made your character into the game's ultimate incendiary device. In this race for Venezuelan power you're a human starting pistol and the main story missions, which see you playing the various factions off against one another, are riots of recklessness that play like the rampage or kill frenzy sections of other, more restrained, sandbox games. They allow you to take the one-man-army idea to the kind of place that Rambo would go on his dream holiday. Luxuriating in an environment whose willingness to be burnt, broken, blown up and collapsed is like few places before - and the game certainly gives you enough targets of a suitable size and importance. Churches, tower blocks, military bases, island fortresses and underground bunkers all require protection or, more usually, obliteration. Often at the end of a contract you're left standing at the epicentre of a disaster zone, the charred carcases of vehicles strewn around and buildings reduced to piles of rubble, or missing completely, with foundations being the only evidence that they ever existed prior to your spontaneous attempts at town planning.

To make all of the action as accessible and fulfilling as possible, the game lavishes equipment upon you. Weapons ranging from pistols to RPGs and dozens of land, sea and air vehicles can be purchased from the different factions or picked up as you move around the map. While the game may be simple in its objectives, it's clever in the way that it provides you with as many tools as it can and then leaves you to create your own personal carnival of carnage. Whether you want to storm into an enemy base on foot with just a machine gun, drive in behind the wheel of a tank, muscle car or pimped out monster truck, or fly in with a petrol tanker attached to your helicopter, each of these choices is available. Of all the options though, the air strikes are the best; the impact of unleashing a fuel-air bomb or tactical nuke that incinerates everything on the screen leaves you groggy with joy and your mind filled with only one thought - "LETS DO THAT AGAIN!" And the great thing about Mercenaries 2, possibly the best thing, is that usually you can, often straight away.

What World in Flames appears to be then is a Michael Bay action film on your console; a place where you get more bang for your buck than virtually anywhere else. But while this may sustain a ninety-minute movie, you need a bit more for a game that's going to last upwards of fifteen hours - and without it, the limitations of Mercenaries 2 eventually begin to show.

Although its premise appears to be basic, Mercs 2 attempts a central idea that's very difficult - bringing together the polar opposites of simple gameplay and a complex sandbox world - but while each of the different factions in Pandemic's virtual Venezuela are busy exploiting the country for all it's worth, the only ones who aren't are the developers themselves and by only taking advantage of its destructibility, they massively under-use its potential. Many of the missions are strangely conservative in their overall conception, requiring you to go to one place, shoot everything and then move on, with only notionally different objectives. The repetition quickly leads to monotony, with any strategic planning very much an afterthought, saved exclusively, if at all, for moments when you're left drowning your sorrows on a load screen after your initial all-guns-blazing attempts have failed.

The chances of you perishing, however, are pretty low for a combination of reasons, the first of which is the poor AI. While enemy soldiers are decent shots, their enthusiasm to fulfil their role as action game cannon fodder means that they take their brainless and brave obligations way beyond the call of duty. In their excitement they regularly get themselves stuck and watching a group of them trying to get their jeep out of a ditch is funny - but not as funny as the way their over-exuberance often causes them to finish off the person or thing they're meant to be protecting from you. The rest of the time they either run straight at you or ignore you, making them extremely easy to kill, especially as, of all the huge weapons in the game, your basic melee attack is the most overpowered. You feel like the angel of death walking around because one touch from you and the poor soul you've just come into contact with goes down for the count, permanently. If this wasn't enough then the health system seems desperate to keep you alive whatever happens; if you're in a helicopter and suffer a direct hit from an anti-aircraft rock that blows the chopper apart and throws your limp body hundreds of feet to the hard, hard ground below, how many of your 100 health points do you often lose? All of them? Seventy-five? No, you lose nine... NINE! It's about the same amount as when you fall down a flight of stairs. The problem isn't that it's a farcical system it's that it's a farcically unbalanced one.

Other sobering matters include the fines imposed for killing civilians, which are particularly annoying considering that pedestrians often throw themselves in front of your vehicle in Saints Row insurance claim style, and the way the route planner on your PDA seems to have been programmed by a disorientated mole with cataracts. More aggravating than these, however, is the fact that the system which decides how popular you are with the different factions is far too erratic and the large bribes you have to pay to any organisations who you've unintentionally enraged just to get them to reopen their shop and contracts will leave your wallet with a nasty hangover and you screaming Bloody Mary.

The game also includes some nasty bits of visual shrapnel. Dubious physics mean that objects often don't so much clip as pass straight through one another, and many items in the environment, like sandbags, wooden crates and hedges either get completely destroyed or survive totally intact. Pop up is bad, even at short distances, most noticeably on vegetation, and everything lacks a level of detail that made GTA IV stand out. The cut scenes also resemble a poorly dubbed South American soap opera thanks to lip-syncing that's frequently off and during play you hear the same lines of dialogue being spouted over and over again.

The ability to play the game co-operatively online with another person accentuates both its sweet and bitter flavours. Having a friend on board to witness all the awesome moments is great and makes success easier to come by, but the single player glitches seem to crop up more frequently than normal - and while the opportunities that the multiplayer mechanics give you to split up should be cheered, the distances you can be separated by become an issue when one of you dies and the other has to try and get to your comrade before an unsympathetic timer runs out.

When the dust finally settles and the damage, both good and bad, can be surveyed, you finally get a taste of the fact that Mercenaries 2: World in Flames is the equivalent of videogame moonshine. To both its benefit and its detriment it's an unrefined concoction of so many volatile parts that you're never sure whether it's going to blow your mind or blow your head clean off. It's definitely a title with some issues that are hard to overlook when compared to the more polished games available elsewhere in the genre, but it can still be great fun and it's most enjoyable when you play it to best resemble the trailer that runs on the title screen - in short, explosive bursts that leave you crying out for more.

Reviewed by James Hamblin for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).