Mercenaries 2 - World in Flames

Getting shot in the backside by your own client is a decent excuse for a war. Mattias Nilsson, the Swedish mercenary with a taste for vodka and grudges, takes a bullet from Venezuelan strongman Ramon Solano in the opening hour, and the rest of the campaign is him dismantling the man's oil empire for a fee. It is a revenge plot with an invoice attached, and that cheerful mercenary amorality is the most consistent thing about the game.

The PS2 version is the awkward member of the family. The first Mercenaries was built for this hardware and looked remarkable on it; the sequel was designed around the PS3 and 360, then cut down to fit a machine that was already four years past its peak. The draw distance shortens, the jungle thins out, the frame rate stumbles when too much ordnance is in the air, and the two-player co-op that defined the newer versions is gone. What survives is the core, and the core is still the destruction. Buildings collapse in pieces rather than vanishing into scripted rubble. A well-placed charge on a support wall brings a guard tower down on the men standing under it.

The loop is straightforward and mostly honest about itself. You take contracts from whichever faction is paying — the Allies, the Chinese, the local guerrillas, the Universal Petroleum corporation — and each job means blowing something up, seizing something, or capturing a high-value target alive for a bigger payout. Money buys airstrikes and vehicle drops called in by radio, which is where the sandbox opens up: a fuel-air bomb summoned onto an airfield, a tank parachuted in beside a roadblock. Hijacking a helicopter by yanking the pilot out mid-hover remains one of the better ideas in any open-world game of the era.

What it lacks is friction. Enemy armies exist to be knocked over, the factions never feel like they are genuinely competing for you, and the mission structure repeats its handful of verbs across the whole map. On stronger hardware that thinness hid behind the fireworks. Here, with the fireworks dimmed, you notice it.

Still, there is something appropriate about this version. A late-life PS2 release of a game about a man who shows up wherever the money is, does enormous damage, and does not stay to think about it. Play it for the demolition and the deadpan Swedish mercenary, and forgive the horizon for being closer than it should be.