Just like the original game, almost all of the vehicles found within the enormous game world of virtual Venezuela can be taken over and used for your own devious deeds. For certain larger vehicles, such as tanks and helicopters, you will need to perform a button sequence to hijack it, but otherwise it is as simple as walking up to the driver, pulling them out and driving off on your merry way.

You will also need to use helicopters and jets for help during your missions by calling in for assistance rather than piloting them. Your helicopter pilot can be called for transit when you have no other reasonable options to go long distances and he is instrumental in bringing supplies that you need, be it a vehicle or simply a crate with supplies. Misha can be used to deliver airstrikes that obliterate enemy targets with a variety of different tactics, such as Carpet Bombs, Bunker Busters, Daisy Cutters and the MOAB, all of which are phenomenal to watch and give you goosebumps as soon as the annihilation ignites.

The assistance comes at a price however, since every time you call in for the chopper or jet, it uses up your oil resources. You start with a very limited supply, but you can find oil depots scattered around which Ewan can come in and steal in his chopper, as well you can get smaller oil deposits from vehicles that have been destroyed. As you progress farther into the game, upgrades can be purchased to allow you to hold more resources and becomes less and less of a restriction on how haphazardly you use your destructive abilities and inherently makes the game a lot more fun.

You can choose to play through the 20-ish hours of gameplay by yourself or you can pull in a friend at any time and play through the game co-operatively. As much fun as it is to play the game with another live person, only the host will have his progress saved while the person who joined will only have their money and resource amounts saved. If the host’s game was further along than your previous game was at the time of joining, it’s a pain to have to replay through everything you just went through when you decide to go back and play by yourself in the singleplayer mode. Unfortunately that’s not the only issues Mercenaries 2 has.

Bugs infest the game and although they only rear their heads once in a while, sometimes it can ruin a mission and sometimes it is nothing more than cars suddenly appearing three feet in front of you on the road. One bug that was encountered was near the start of the game where you were instructed to toss a smoke grenade into a marked area. After throwing - dropping, lobbing, pirouetting - a grenade in the marked area countless times and having the game say it was in the wrong location, the mission needed to be restarted from the beginning.