Mercenaries 2: World in Flames

Zamkoff hopes that having the villa as your base of operations - a home for the people you recruit, your weapons stockpile, and fleets of cars and aircraft - will act as a regular reminder of the steps that brought you there, and help keep the story in mind. As you build up your PMC, completing missions and messing around in the world, you'll start to track Solano all the way up his operation, taking out endless lieutenants until you can hunt him down and - in the game's third act - take revenge upon him.

Whether or not the story grabs you the way Zamkoff hopes though (and it does sound a bit generic told this straightforwardly), the signs are positive that the rest of the game will. Apart from its monstrous scale (we pull up binoculars at one point and spy a radio tower on the distant horizon - and then head over there and blow it up), empire-building side sections and sandbox mentality, it also boasts depth in detail. There are the "action hijacks", where you can run up the barrel of a tank and hurl its occupants to the ground, or hijack a helicopter with a grappling hook. These elements call to mind Sony's overly hard but promising PSP title Pursuit Force, while the mission design principle of "what not how" - telling you what to do, but not how to achieve it - bring it back into line with Crackdown to some extent. As does some of the more brilliantly spontaneous entertainment. Every chopper has a winch, for example, and there's nothing to stop you using it to pick up cars or even oil tankers. Tossing an oil tanker with a friend in it over a cliff and then firing rockets at its backside strikes us as a particularly amusing way to make up for all those times Kristan "accidentally" shoots us in the back.

Which is of course also to say that Mercs 2 will boast drop-in co-operative play of the sort that we've come to expect from next-generation action games. That said, there will probably be limits. Partly to stop you losing track of your friend, and partly because there's so much going on in the game world, Pandemic's currently restraining you to a 500-metre bubble of co-op, although their ambition obviously stretches further. Indeed, we're told that Mercs 2 treats single-player and multiplayer as the same thing.

All of which leave us with just one question, really - why Venezuela? "One of the core ideals of Mercs is a ripped-from-the-headlines feel," Zamkoff starts by explaining. "Now, we don't want to be a photo-realistic war-game - we certainly don't want to give the impression that we take ourselves too seriously, that we're trying to sell war as hell - but we do like to give some pertinence to the game. And right now we feel like the big crisis in the world that's pending is oil." Well spotted. "So Mercs 2 is an oil crisis in Venezuela. We didn't want to do the Middle East - obviously it could have been an oil crisis in the Middle East, but we feel like the colour palette in Mercs was one of the areas we didn't deliver on as well as we wanted to. If we'd gone to the Middle East it would've been the same colour palette. So we did some research and discovered that Venezuela is one of the world's largest oil-producing countries, there's a lot of instability, obviously there's political drama going on there these days - in addition to just being a very sexy backdrop for a game."

So there you have it: a World in Flames with an eye for colour. For more from the man who wants you to "blow s*** up", flick to the next page for a fuller interview - including the latest (or lack thereof) on those Venezuelan politicians who thought the game was "a justification for an imperialist aggression". Yikes.