Set in Venezuela - apparently a hotbed of political strife - the storyline’s driving force is split equally between greed and revenge. There are several factions struggling to overthrow the government. As a mercenary, it’s your ‘job’ to take advantage of this situation by finding the best deal available to increase your funds. You also just happen to be there on a mission of revenge against the man who double-crossed you.

The fact that a country torn apart by civil war acts as the backdrop to a game with such trite and cartoonish scenarios seems a tad distasteful. Sure it’s just a videogame, but in a time where games are regularly accused of every crime under the media sun, it wouldn’t have hurt to simply give the Venezuelans a break and have it set in a fictional South American country. Having said that, reality is certainly not the game's strong point, so perhaps political savvy is not to be expected from the developers.

The game begins with the player selecting from three typically stereotyped characters. Though they have different basic abilities, in truth their differences are minimal. Once your avatar has been chosen, it’s on to the action and initially the signs are very good. One of the first things the player gets to indulge in is taking out a patrol of Venezuelan soldiers with a grenade launcher. This is followed up by destroying a huge tower with an air-strike and then an entire village with a tank. The visceral delight in blowing rows and rows of palm trees out of the ground as you trundle through the hills is initially very compelling. At this stage of the proceedings, it appears that mindless fun is indeed all it’s cracked up to be. Once the initial buzz has worn away, however, it’s on to the game proper, where things aren’t quite so thrilling.

The player can recruit fellow mercenaries by performing tasks for them. Once these have been completed, said mercenaries will join your ranks and are available for back-up whenever necessary (if the price is right, that is). The first chap you hire, a helicopter pilot, is a ridiculous Irish stereotype who loves boozing, women and gambling. There's no reason why he shouldn’t be a womanising boozer, but the fact that so little effort has been made in characterisation across the whole game means that your senses are pained a little more every time another ridiculous stereotype makes an appearance.

In many ways, this doesn’t really matter. Mercenaries 2 was never likely to be any kind of serious comment on the state of either the oil industry, or Venezuelan Private Military Contractors, or how countries are unfairly stereotyped. In fact, the breezy fashion that everything is dealt with comes as a refreshing change when you consider how serious many of its contemporaries want to be.

The game gives players the opportunity to deal destruction on an unprecedented level. Just about every single item or piece of scenery in the game can be destroyed. At first, this appears to be a wonderfully joyous idea: driving down the main street in a tank while taking out legions of troops and their vehicles; calling in air-strikes to take out entire buildings or even enormous palaces; stealing every passing vehicle at a moments notice. All this and more can be yours in the world of Mercenaries 2.

If all this sounds too good to be true, it’s because interaction on such a scale comes at a hefty price. The graphics are not just below-average for a PS3 game, they are barely above-average for a PS2 game. Sure there’s an enormous amount to see and do, but graphical inadequacies should not be so prevalent in such a high–profile release. It’s amongst the most untidy titles on next-generation consoles. Pop-up is rife, as are bizarre inconsistencies in the game design. It’s frequently impossible to complete certain missions simply because the NPCs won’t go where they are supposed to. One ludicrous scenario has you throwing smoke grenades to mark the spot where you want your back-up to land in their chopper, only to see them land somewhere completely different and run around like headless chickens while you are surrounded and killed. In another scenario, you'll be leaving a house after a cut-scene, only to find the place surrounded and, try as you might, it’s almost impossible to avoid being mowed down in three seconds flat. As a final blow, how about your character getting killed while the ‘Mission Completed’ sign appears on screen? These are just some examples of either insufficient technical proficiency, a lack of time, or just the vast overreaching of Pandemic Studios. The final product is rife with dreadful game-breaking experiences.

Whether you can forgive these problems or not depends, quite frankly, on how much you enjoy blowing things up. If your idea of a good game is one that simply lets you drive around a town shooting everything in site and blowing buildings to pieces, then this could well be gaming heaven. If, however, tightly structured game environments, compelling missions and reliable and stable graphics are your idea of a good game, then you would do well to stay clear.

The really annoying thing is that occasionally the game does truly shine and gives an indication of what could have been. Missions such as driving round a quarry in an oversized 4x4 and performing insane jumps whilst being shot at by helicopters are hugely entertaining, and this says much about the quality of the original concept for Mercenaries. The missions are wonderfully varied in concept - just poorly executed. The characters, whilst wafer thin, have a charming simplicity about them, and the simple joy of being able to utterly destroy a city block, should you wish, is unparalleled. The controls stand up fairly well, the range of activities is varied and the game world is certainly big enough to keep players occupied for a long time.

At times, it is a wonderfully fun game. Destruction on this kind of level, with the tongue-in-cheek nature of the narrative makes for an enjoyable experience in small doses. It’s unfortunate that so much of the game world is so irredeemably broken. Mercenaries 2 is a game that doesn’t give a whole lot of credence to the real world. It may be just a video game, but that shouldn’t stop game designers from at least attempting to get things right. There’s nothing wrong with having scope and vision; unfortunately, if it’s tied to broken game design, then it’s impossible to really enjoy.