Mercenaries 2: World in Flames
Interview: the next great co-op explosion-fest
At first glance Mercenaries 2 reminded us of a lot of other games; Just Cause, Crackdown or even (surprise, surprise) Mercs 1. But once we jumped into the carnage on Xbox Live, we discovered it's taken the best elements of the above to create possibly the next great free-roaming co-op game.
The Venezuelan environment is a proper (cough, cough) playground of destruction, with choppers, tanks, petrol tankers and more at hand to send entire skyscrapers shaking to the ground, and you can do it all with a buddy in full-on drop-in co-op. Crackdown; watch out.
We caught up with senior producer at Pandemic, Jonathan Zamkoff, who was happy to field our questions.
Sign up to the GamesRadar+ Newsletter
Weekly digests, tales from the communities you love, and more
Stellar Blade director "grew up too poor to afford" a PS1, but when he finally got one in college, Ridge Racer and Final Fantasy inspired him to make games
Oh, that's why the Stellar Blade devs were terrified by demo players: one fan's spent "about 60 hours" maxing Eve's skill tree before the action RPG is even out