I’ve been trying to lick up the last crumbs of the previous gen recently, and bought a second-hand copy of Mercenaries. It got lukewarm reviews, but I’ve really been enjoying it.

It’s essentially a military-themed version of GTA set in an imaginary invasion of North Korea, except with that you can have items airlifted in, which eliminates a lot of the tedium in making sure you have good enough equipment for a mission. I’ve always found the big weakness of the 3D GTAs is that the missions themselves are less exciting than exploring the possibilities of the world, especially because you can often fail them simply because it wasn’t clear what you were supposed to be doing, or because of an overly tight deadline or other restriction.

There is a little bit of that sort of frustration in Mercenaries (for example, an assassination mission where you can spook your target by getting too close, which is logical but wasn’t mentioned in the mission briefing), but the missions are generally actually quite exciting and fun.

I just did a mission to rescue a some Allied troops near a downed chopper. Obviously going in on my own copter was a bad idea given the presence of air defences, so I flew halfway there then commandeered a troop transport. I took out one SAM launcher with RPGs, rushed the second and grenaded it until it blew up, then called in an airstrike on the third. My transport got wrecked, so I made it to the troops on foot and with the SAMs gone, I could have another vehicle airdropped and flee just as the Nork reinforcements arrived.

It’s also technically amazing - the world is really big and the engine works well on foot or in the air (admittedly with liberal use of fog). When you mark the site of an airdrop with smoke, the incoming copter blows it around. The explosions are quite good for the Xbox.

Anyway, why did no-one tell me that this was a great game, and that I should be excited about Mercenaries 2? There was a preview in Edge which I flipped through and have now thrown away - does anyone know if it is scanned somewhere?