The game kicks off pretty nice: you arrive in Venezuela, get a job offer from a big shot named Robert Solano and you start spreading bullets and blowing gates up, driving tanks and generally turning everything into a burning hell. Which, I must admit, is pretty nice for the beginning of a game. Unfortunately, that’s about it… the rest is either repetitive, boring or it simply lacks challenge and Mercenaries 2: World in Flames quickly turns into a huge pile of pointless violence.
The idea of the game is that, following the job you get done for Solano, he kicks you in the but and you need your revenge. There are many factions present in Venezuela, like the People’s Liberation Army of Venezuela, Rastafarian Pirates, Universal Petroleum, the Chinese army and Allied Nations and you can join any of these to achieve your goals. However, no matter what you choose to do the story appears to be the same and not after long you’ll simply ignore it, you stop caring about everything and mechanically blow stuff up. Because that’s the main source of fun in the game.
The enemy AI is not at all challenging and most of the time you’ll get the impression that you’re fighting against training dummies and not cold blooded soldiers. They indeed come in huge numbers, but that only means that you’ll leave behind more bodies and it will take you just a bit longer to finish a rather easy job. If you are outnumbered and you need to restore your health, you can just run away to get your health bar back up: the enemy soldiers will never go after you, instead they will pretend that you never existed. The same goes for any other situation when you pass by some enemies: they’ll stay glued to wherever they were in the first place.
But that’s not all. Your character will have some serious trouble every now and then when he gets blocked behind a try, round a corner or God knows where. On the other hand, even the lightest Jeep will be unstoppable: it can cut down trees five times bigger, it can kill enemies and generally it will destroy everything that happens to get in its way. And these are some things that have nothing to do with real life or a quality game.