Once you get into Mercenaries you'll realize that Pandemic and LucasArts really love military sh*t. The sheer volume of vehicles, weapons, and toys is immense. You'll travel with two guns simultaneously, plus two kinds of grenades, and at any time you can jack vehicles. Jacking vehicles brings great, great pleasure. You can jack regular civilian vehicles, jeeps, trucks, tanks, and even helicopters. Pretty much any vehicle you can see you can control. Sweeping onto the cannon of a tank and gutting the pilot with a grenade is a wild event every single time you do it.

Using Havok physics to give the game a sense of gravity and realism, Pandemic has tuned each vehicle to drive differently, with tanks being cumbersome and powerful while jeeps and sedans are more loose and wily. Tanks can be a pain to control, thanks to their slow, awkward steering controls, while the helicopters are remarkably nimble and satisfying. Don't worry, though, you're given liberal opportunities to handle them all.

What's more, the game might permit you to run-and-mindlessly-gun through a number of missions but there is strategy behind a significant number of them. You'll need to figure out which guns, air strikes, and tools work best, and how and when you should use them. Strategy is key, and so is knowing the nature of your weapons. But the trial-and-error nature of the game emerges readily enough. You might breezily finish one mission the first time around, while the next contract might take three hours.

Unlike GTA, however, this game hands you endless military power, Mercenaries' true calling as a sandbox endeavor. Each completed mission opens up the Merchant of Menace -- an online weapons store -- and completed missions open up oodles of power. So, if you don't like the weapons you're handed, you can buy others on the fly. More importantly, once you call in a surgical strike on an enemy cannon, or use a megaton bomb to level a skyscraper, you'll fully appreciate the beauty of Mercenaries. You can literally destroy an entire city -- similar to the way you can in MechAssault 2: Lone Wolf and still have money, weapons and vehicles left over to go on your merry way. This single attribute is absolutely addicting on its own.

The issues I have with Mercenaries are very minor. Handling weapons is sweet, controlling vehicles is excellent (though some might not like the stiff panhandle controls), and the game's open nature is well balanced and expertly thought out. The AI, on the other hand, is interesting. It's not all that smart or stealthy, but it's very aggressive. In many missions you'll find yourself simply outnumbered and overwhelmed with unending enemy manpower. You'll encounter rockets launched into your chest, and I learned the heard way that enemies are ruthless enough to run you over in their cars (something I found both awesome and annoying). In other missions, you'll know you've interpreted the mission badly when the AI instantly slaughters you, overpowers your one-man force, or chases you away. On the other hand, it's often stupid. You can drive into an open enemy jeep through their city without being noticed. You can land a helicopter not far from a roadside filled with tanks and jeeps, and if they don't see you land, they'll drive right by.

Grab that Russian mafia heli and give 'em hell!