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Game Review

Mattias Nilsson is a mercenary of the old school. He isn’t wired on future-crank, like the guns-for-hire of “Haze,” and he doesn’t have an underdeveloped crisis of conscience, like the bro-skis of “Army of Two” — he’s just a man who loves blowing stuff up.

You probably will, too, playing as Nilsson or one of his squad-mates in the new shooter “Mercenaries 2: World in Flames,” which includes some excellent combat madness and makes for a nice antidote to over-serious, hyperrealistic games.

Madness is the key here: Corporate-style military contractors have almost replaced special operators as the characters in today’s video games, but “Mercs 2” has no overwrought orchestral soundtrack, no hand-wringing storyline about the implications of substituting contractors for soldiers, no doom and gloom.

Instead, the game offers a giant map with a series of missions and submissions, a la “Grand Theft Auto,” in which you can go anywhere, take any vehicle and destroy virtually everything.

It’s just as well, because Nilsson is the kind of guy that real-life private military contractors insist they don’t hire: a violence-loving Swede with a blonde Mohawk, double-braided goatee, tattoo sleeves and a leather vest. “I’m here because you need something obliterated,” he tells potential employers.

“Mercs 2” finds Nilsson and his team in Venezuela, trying to get payback on a rogue general who tried to kill him after hiring him to recover a hostage kidnapped by a rival faction. In addition to the government and the rebels, there are several other factions on the giant “Mercs” map, including an American oil company and its security team and a Chinese-backed militia. Each one has jobs for Nilsson and Co., and you spend most of the game doing the bidding of one group against its enemy.

If this sounds a lot like “Grand Theft Auto,” it is, and there are more similarities. When you get a new mission, you often have to steal a passing car to get where you need to go, and you spend a lot of time driving on the map from Point A to Point B, with the option to branch off for submissions or just random violence.

If you want your video game time optimized around action and fixed mission objectives, “Mercs 2” may not be for you. Likewise, maybe take a pass if you’re a stickler for precise weapons: Even in a crouch, sighting down the barrel, Nilsson misses with about every third round. This game is dedicated to stealing motorcycles, crashing them through roadblocks and attacking like a banshee, not dropping enemies from a distance.

And this is real destruction: Your rocket-propelled grenades or tank shells don’t just blast preprogrammed holes in building walls, they bring down the entire structure. If you’ve got enough firepower, you can atomize walls, houses and everything else in the environment; I didn’t encounter a single structure I couldn’t demolish with a little work.

Strange as it sounds, this takes a little getting used to, but soon you’ll save time and ordnance by blowing up entire houses instead of trying to pick off bad guys in the windows or on the roof. When you figure out you can just place a C4 charge on the wall to get into an enemy compound, you’ll curse yourself for wasting all that time trying to sneak around to find the back entrance.

True to the advance hype, there are many ways to accomplish each mission, and your options expand the more you play. Early on, you may only be able to assassinate a target the old-fashioned way — by blasting your way into his compound and shooting him yourself — but later, you can call in an airstrike or bring down the building with a tank. Stealth and subtlety are options, too, theoretically, but this ain’t “Operation: Flashpoint” and you can’t subdue a single guard without his mates being tipped off.

Because of this frantic gameplay and the giant open world, “Mercs 2” replicates very closely the feel of playing a shooter in a multiplayer mode, only with no Web connection needed. This kept the campaign mode from getting stale, I thought, and it will give players without the Internet a taste of an online experience. I couldn’t test the online component because I played an advance copy sent to Military Times before the multiplayer servers were set up. It would’ve been nice, but what’s great about this game is that I almost felt they weren’t required.

Mercenaries 2: World in Flames

Buy? Rent? Skip? Our verdict: BUY