Mercenaries 2: World in Flames

Mostly the latter. The private military company serves more to customize the player's options than it does in any direct management or strategic capacity. This said, there is a light strategy layer in the game involved with acquiring and outfitting the right support for the right situations.

With the exception of terrain and water everything in Mercenaries 2 can be destroyed. Most objects in the game will respawn over time but some key places and things, once destroyed, will remain destroyed throughout the course of the game as a testament to the player's destructive capacity!

We've only announced Mr. Stomare so far but we have plenty of high quality VO talent lined up for the characters in the game.

The game is very much inspired by Venezuela . We worked very hard to capture the look, feel and flavour of that part of the world but it's not a city-by-city or street-by-street recreation. Obviously we have to strike the right balance between getting the environment as real as possible while making plenty of concessions in order to be able to compact a giant country into a game world that is feasible to create for and explore but I hope that anyone who knows a thing or two about Venezuela will feel as though we did our homework.

We've added quite a few new vehicles, weapons and air strikes. The player will be able to pilot boats throughout the water areas of the Mercenaries 2 which is an entirely new class of vehicles added to the Mercenaries franchise. The Daisy Cutter and MOAB air strikes bring a whole new dimension to support options in the game: you'll able to use either of these to clear out large sections of foliage cover! All in all there are hundreds of new vehicles and dozens of new weapons and support items!

Our action hijacks from Mercenaries 1 were intended to be special, cinematic moments that matched the over the top action movie vibe that we were trying hard to achieve but once you learned the timing for a particular class of vehicle it was fairly easy to dispatch what was intended to be a formidable vehicular foe. The interactive minigame sequence allows us to scale the difficulty of the action hijack sequence so that hijacking a Helicopter Gunship is much harder to do that a turret-less Little Bird!

Unfortunately Mercs 2 will only feature a co-operative mode, although you're certainly welcome to emergently turn the game's robust mechanics into a deathmatch against your friend at any time!

Given that we try to strike a blend between setting our game in real world, plausible scenarios and over the top fantasy this sort criticism is always to be expected. This said, Mercenaries 2 is a work of fiction and any resemblance to real world people or situations is unintended.

Most definitely. More than 50 per cent of the objectives you'll have in Mercenaries 2 involve ancillary tasks for various factions in the world. A relatively small portion of the tasks in the game are compulsory.

Definitely online cooperative play. Being able to play with my buddy in an open world action game is a pretty new frontier in video gaming and I'm glad that we're trailblazing in this regard. Two player action in the world of Mercenaries will our emergent "what, not how" game philosophy to a whole new level!

The technology and tools for Mercenaries 2 has been completely rewritten from the ground up as to specifically support big open world action games. Open worlds games are massive and complex collections of code and data - without the proper technology or tools creating them can be a nightmare. From our experience on the first game we were able to identify many of the needs we would have our of tools and tech this time around and now that we're in full production that research is really paying off big time.

Anything's possible! At the moment we're only concentrating on the versions of the game we've announced but I'd love for us to work on a handheld version of Mercs!