I'm driving parrots from one end of a winding mountain road to another. It's my third attempt. It seems the Venezuelan army really doesn't want these parrots to get to their destination. They've suddenly stationed heavily armed guards all over this mountain to intercept parrot smugglers. The parrots are in boxes in the back of a beat-up gaudy pick-up truck. The loose boxes shuffle and bounce around in the open truck bed. A lot of them bounce out of the truck, especially when I have to ramp over a ravine. Once a certain number of boxes have bounced out of the truck, I've failed the mission.

I've purchased tanks, attack helicopters, cruise missile strikes, and crates full of military-grade explosives. I've bribed multinational oil companies and even the United Nations. You'd think I could afford a few bungie cords.

Read the Mercenaries 2 review after the jump.

Merceneries 2 is outrageous. That's the point. You go from delivering parrots to murdering soldiers in swathes at a time to bringing down skyscrapers to racing a jet ski to hijacking a passing helicopter. You are a terrorist, freedom fighter, criminal, sociopath, and extreme sportsman, but unlike Grand Theft Auto, you're not part of any social order. You're just here to wreak havoc and make a buck.

This is the sequel to one of the original Xbox's best sandbox games. The action has moved from Korea to Venezuela, where a corrupt businessman has engineered a coup, installing soldiers around the countryside and its various miniature cities. There are three factions jockeying for position, and you can lend your services where you like. Smuggle parrots for the Jamaican pirates, take down oil company depots for the mountain guerrillas, or protect corporate VIPs for United Petroleum. And when things come to a head, the stakes are raised.

One point of continuity from the original game is Peter Stormare as the voice of the Swedish mercenary. Who's going to choose the hot chick or the cool black dude when you can instead be the guy from the Volkswagen commercials? Oddly enough, the dialogue seems to play out almost identically no matter whom you choose. This just goes to show how little thought went into the storyline. There are a couple of genuinely funny moments, but for the most part, the game's most powerful narrative hook is Stormare's weird accent and "we-wants-the-money, Lebowski" intonation. I could listen to Stormare say "newcolor bunkerbuster" (i.e. "nuclear bunker buster") all day.

Whereas your main activity in Grand Theft Auto is driving, your main activity here is blowing things up. The match of destruction to destructibility is Mercenaries 2's main selling point. Almost everything can fall down or blow up, and almost always in a dramatic way. The gunplay and explosions are so 80s action movie. These are the sort of Hollywood pyrotechnics that should have Stallone or Schwarzenegger running in front of them. And wait until you get to the oil rig. Next to Mercenaries 2, EA's other game about destructible stuff, Battlefield: Bad Company, is a sad joke.

There are lots of side activities, and if you just charge you way along the main storyline, Mercenaries 2 is going to be pretty short. At which point you're left with a really big bomb you can use if you want to mop up the side activities you didn't do on the way to the ending. There's also some slick co-op gaming. A friend can just drop in and help you, or vice versa. It can be a bit awkward, but it's effective and it's an enormous help during some of the harder missions.

When it comes to shooting, breaking, and blowing up stuff, don't be fooled by the faux generosity with weaponry. You get a wide variety of toys, but many have no distinguishable differences. Each of the factions has pretty much the same arsenal with only slightly different skins or names. There's no real sense that you're getting anything special by throwing in your lot with one group or another. This is in marked contract to the original game, which seemed to force the occasional hard decision. Mercenaries 2 is afraid to favor, or even distinguish one side from another. Part of the problem is that there's almost no feedback about which guns or vehicles or explosions are effective in which situations. Does a sniper rifle from the guerrillas differ in any meaningful way from a sniper rifle from the oil company mercs? Are all light, medium, and heavy tanks identical? What's the difference among various air strikes beyond the handful of methods for calling them in? Having 200 different toys isn't any different from having 10 toys when they come in lots of 20 identical toys. And it doesn't help when probably 150 of the toys are mostly useless.

All this is made even more laborious by the awful interface for managing your air strikes, weapon deliveries, and vehicles. Mercenaries 2 deserves kudos for including fuel as a way of limiting the inevitable glut of money as you get further into the game. But nearly everything else about your arsenal is a huge hassle that's more trouble than it's worth. You can set up three different abilities to access from the controller while you're fighting, although even this is a weird 2.5 step process. Stop moving and shooting, d-pad, button press.

To bring in anything beyond whatever three toys you have queued up, you have to pause the game and shuffle through your overbearing and unhelpful list. This gives the action a staccato pace, particularly as you puzzle over the list and wonder how much certain things cost and where you're going to have to go to get more. Did this air strike cost $50,000, or a half a million dollars? Where do you get more if you run out? This info isn't included anywhere. Mercenaries 2 has exactly the kind of interface you don't want in a game this exciting and over-the-top. It's a nearly sure-fire way to break the fun.

Speaking of broken, there are lots of disappointing glitches in the physics, AI, and sound. For instance, the developers recorded about a quarter as much dialogue as the game needs. There's far too much repetition here, particularly from Fiona who reminds you every five minutes that if you need a hint or are "feeling a little lost", you can come back to headquarters to talk to her. She's the most insecure mission voiceover you'll ever meet. And I have to wonder who this Rodrigo guy is, who's instantly suspected all over Venezuela of drunk driving whenever a car behaves erratically (an all-too-frequent occurrence given the wretched traffic AI).

The world building is mostly good, but considering the gold standard set by Grand Theft Auto IV, there's a lot that's disappointing: the lack of detail, the lack of persistent destruction, the infrequent traffic and pedestrians, no day/night cycle. On the whole, Venezuela doesn't feel alive so much as propped up like a stack of milk bottles, waiting for you to knock them down. Then, when you're not looking, it stacks them up again. Also propped up are your character's last two points of health, which seem magically resistant to bullets, explosions, and falls from unsuccessfully hijacked helicopters.

To cap it all off, the end of the game was broken for me. I walked through a door after what was probably the longest and most involved, over-the-top "key hunt" ever. I got to the point where the final cut scene occurred and suddenly I was looking at the inside of the polygons used for a helicopter, with no way to see anything else. I had to do some Simon Sez buttonry with no idea what they actually accomplished. And then the sequence ended and the game was over. Gee, thanks, Mercenaries 2. Maybe if I play through a second time, I'll actually get to see the ending instead of just hear it.

There's no excuse for this sort of sloppiness. The time to get these things right is the sequel. But Mercenaries 2 feels like a first iteration. A great first iteration, to be sure, and one filled with awesome gunplay and explosions. But we already saw that in the first game. We've come a long way since then: Saints Row, Crackdown, Bully, GTA4. Too bad Mercenaries hasn't.