It's late 2008, which means that the righteously named Operation Iraqi Freedom, also known as the American invasion of Iraq, has been running now for over five years. This pushes it well out of the "invasion” phase and into the "occupation” phase or into the "rebuilding” phase depending on your politics, but more than anything else, it means this has been going on for a damn long time. War weariness is at an all time high, and popular culture has had plenty of time to take its own shots at the whole affair.

One of the most interesting of these snipes was Pandemic Studio's Mercenaries. A sandbox-style game set against the backdrop of an Allied (read: American) invasion of North Korea, it put you in the shoes of a soldier of fortune looking to make a little profit in the war-torn company, helping out whichever factions took your fancy. Mercenaries clearly took a lot of its cues from real world events, and it in fact preceded the controversy generated by the "private military company” Blackwater and its involvement in the Iraq conflict.

But that was 2005, and while not a lot has changed in old Mesopotamia, much has changed for Mercenaries and Pandemic. Console hardware has experienced a paradigm shift; the developer was merged with BioWare and then bought by EA, and the president of Venezuela claimed that the Mercenaries sequel was set in his country as a propaganda tool of the US government to intimidate his people and focus the American public on a new potential target. All these factors have impacted on the end result, and sadly Mercenaries 2 just can't hold its ground against the onslaught.

The first casualty of war is possibly the most important: the quasi real-world backdrop and "ripped from the headlines” storyline. In its place is a fairly ridiculous revenge plot, in which one of the mercenaries from the original game is seeking revenge against Ramon Solano, who hired the player to spring an old army buddy from the brig after a failed coup attempt. Solano decides it would be easier to kill your merc than pay the bill, resulting in your character getting shot in the bum while attempting to escape the double-cross, and swearing revenge as a result, no matter how many soldiers, civilians, vehicles or buildings get in your way.

The setup is undeniably silly, and it feels like something done to avoid causing too much of a firestorm of controversy after complaints from Venezuelans. And it's really just a pretext for doing what the original Mercenaries did so well: dropping you in a war-zone and letting you go nuts! Like before there is a variety of factions who you can work for; China and the "allied nations” return for the sequel in the role of squabbling superpowers, and you can work for United Petroleum as a private contractor or go all Che Guevara for the People's Liberation Army of Venezeula. Of course it wouldn't be Mercenaries without some sort of black market faction to keep things interesting, and this time the Russian Mafia is replaced by a band of Jamaican pirates.

It's a disparate group of rival factions to be sure, and just like the original Mercenaries, keeping the peace while still getting jobs done is a crucial part of the game's balancing act. It's a tad more forgiving than the original, and when faction members spot you doing something naughty they'll radio it in to HQ, which gives you a few precious seconds to take them out and prevent the bosses even knowing you've done anything wrong. If murdering every witness to your misdeeds doesn't float your boat though, the game has been expanded to let you do things a bit more sneakily...plant some C4 or call in an airstrike and then leg it out of the vicinity and there's a good chance they'll blame the bombs and building collapses on someone else!

Explosives are where Mercenaries 2 really stands out too: there's a lot of them, a lot of things to use them on, and a lot of very pretty fireballs when the deed is done! Attacks range from old-school artillery strikes to tactical nuclear warheads, meaning there's a method of destruction to suit every taste and budget! Raining down fiery death doesn't come cheap though; in Mercenaries 2 there's the financial cost of course, but now there is also a petrol expense to actually fuel up the jets and get them in the air. Thankfully you don't need to queue up at the local Shell with your 4c off voucher and a really big tank to store it in though – it's much more fitting to just steal it from the country you're already looting and abusing for profit!

One of the first things you'll do once in-country is recruit some talent for your soldier-of-fortune startup: you'll need a chopper pilot, a mechanic and a jet pilot for your bombing runs. The chopper pilot is priority one, because he's the one who drops off supplies for you, but more importantly, he's also the guy who can help you pull off a bit of grand theft aero and steal supplies belonging to other factions. You can pinch petrol, acquire ammo and even misappropriate money by the pallet-load, all of which is essential to funding your operations in Venezuela.

Larceny is as simple as selecting an item on the ground and then calling in the chopper, making it a quick and relatively painless procedure...assuming nobody sees you nicking things. Annoyingly, this is the only way to secure petrol for your weapons of mass destruction, and this is what makes the process a lot less fun than it should be. If Pandemic had seen fit to allow you to pay for petrol at a premium like every other bastard in Australia is doing, it would have at least have given you the choice when you're in a hurry or just can't be bothered.

Problem is, then nobody would bother grabbing gas with the chopper, since money is much more abundant in this sequel. Call it inflation if you like, but even shopaholics should rarely be strapped for cash in Mercenaries 2, which of course has the effect of making you spend it much more readily. As a result, you'll be buying bombs and charging C4 to your credit card with gay abandon, and you'll get the impression this is exactly what Pandemic wanted you to do.

Where the original Mercenaries required a degree of restraint and a tactical application of your ordnance, this sequel actively requires you to blow up a helluva lot of stuff! In addition to the usual faction missions you can complete, each group has a number of key targets they need you to destroy, ranging from half a dozen to ten or more per side. Much like with the thievery or doing of misdeeds, you can either flaunt your actions and deal with the consequences, or strategically place some C4 or call in an airstrike and then hoof it out of the vicinity to avoid suspicion. Either way you'll earn cold hard cash for your troubles, as well as unlock more vehicles, ordnance and weapon drops with the faction in question.

What made the original Mercenaries so unique though was its use of the Most Wanted deck, which mimicked America's real world attempts to put faces to the names of its targets on the backs of playing cards issued to its ground troops. It was a great way to add some personality to these assassination/capture missions, and sadly it is also something Pandemic have chosen not to implement in the sequel. Instead you'll have High Value Targets, or HVTs, added to your map, and you can just go and take them down if you want to. They aren't tied into the story in any way and have no names or personalities or backstories for you to delve into, and it's a crying shame because it was the true highlight of the original Mercenaries.

Still, you'll earn money for taking them down and even more for bringing them in, and at the end of the day, that's what it's all about. The bulk of your money will come from the main missions though, and so you'll be on the trail of Blanco, Solano and General Carmona before long and on the rough road to revenge. The core story missions really won't take you all that long to complete, and can probably be handled in 6-8 hours if you're in a hurry. The missions themselves don't really get more difficult as you advance, rather the amount of enemies you encounter seems to increase sharply, as does their propensity for being in tanks or armed with rocket launchers.

It's just as well that your mercenary is almost impossible to kill then, although some people will find the dumbing down of proceedings a little disappointing. Get hit by a tank shell, rocket artillery strike or even fall a kilometre out of a moving helicopter and you will be reduced to two or three health, the world will get all hazy and wobbly, and you'll basically be given a chance to get to cover or kill your assailants. It also seems like you take less damage during these moments, which makes dying something that happens a lot less often than in the original. It's a double-edged sword really – it makes things less frustrating, but also a lot less rewarding.

With all that said, it's entirely possible that Pandemic realised they had to go easy on gamers if they were intent on shipping such a bug-ridden and glitchy product. Getting hit through walls, having supply drops and vehicles vanish, half dying as you walk down a hill, target buildings that won't register as destroyed, HVTs dying for no reason...this is just a small sample of the distasteful dishes Mercenaries 2 serves up with an unpleasant frequency. You can only shake your head and wonder how a company like Pandemic can let an important sequel to their own IP ship in such a shoddy state, but sadly it seems to be less the exception and more the rule these days.

On the plus side, at least the controls aren't sloppy. Mercenaries 2 is responsive and easy to control for the most part, and even the disparate variety of vehicles are a pleasure to pilot. As you complete takeover missions for factions you can unlock supply bases too, which allow you to rapidly transit across the admittedly spacious map. Like the original, what makes Mercenaries 2 fun is how seamlessly you can transit between foot combat and driving tanks or flying choppers, and like any good sandbox game, many of your fondest memories here won't be of scripted moments, rather the fun you make for yourself.

Despite an extended gestation period that saw the game delayed, Mercenaries 2 is not a particularly great looking game. It used to be that we excused sandbox games for lacking the finer details because of their enormous scope and scale, but GTA4 really shot that excuse in the ass, and Mercenaries 2 suffers as a result. The textures are often low-res junk, repeated often, and it's only when in the air or moving quickly that the game looks gorgeous. It's not horrible by any stretch, but it is apparent that the game's assets have been compromised by EA's desire to cram the ambitious game onto a positively geriatric Playstation 2.

The audio doesn't have this excuse though: it's just bad. The voice acting runs the gamut from alright to positively awful, there's too few lines of dialogue for the mercenaries and your opponents, the game world itself is almost mute most of the time and EA haven't even busted out some licensed EA Trax to at least spice things up musically. Aurally, Mercenaries 2 is disappointing in pretty much every regard besides the explosions.

The only chance the game has for redemption in many gamer's eyes would have been the promise of co-operative play throughout the entire campaign. Sadly, the result is some sort of cruel parody of what online co-op should be...the second player basically has to follow the other around and has little control over proceedings, and for some reason you both have to be within a ridiculously small range of each other before you hit invisible walls. You'd almost wish they hadn't bothered, except for those occasional glimmers of self-made fun that makes it all worth it: co-piloting a chopper Apocalypse Now style, accidentally killing a HVT in your buddy's campaign and laughing at his misfortune, these are the things that make co-op, and Mercenaries 2 as a whole, fun.