12 Hugely Underrated Open-World Games You Totally Missed

4. Mercenaries 2: World In Flames

Just Cause 3 might be incoming in 2015, but it was Pandemic's Mercenaries games that first put the idea of absolute chaos and unabashed destruction at the front of the experience. Both Mercenaries games prided themselves on letting you level buildings, call in supply drops and ensure you were consistently stocked up on bullets and grenades, and it's the second one that started factoring in more vehicular-based experimentation to spice things up. The selling point was - and still is - the destruction, Mercs 2 actually featuring a pretty cool 'collect 'em all'-style setup to getting through the campaign. See, like the first game, each enemy leader is represented by a playing card, tasking you to go out into the field and either extract or kill them. If you've recently played or seen some of Metal Gear Solid V and enjoyed the whole "Sprinting through enemy ranks with a prisoner on your back" setup, Mercs has far more of that to get stuck into, the entire world around you collapsing to cinders along the way. These days the very notion of getting a stable frame rate on a game is one in a million, but somehow amongst all the carnage this managed to hold it together - for the vast majority anyway, giving you one of the best explosive sandboxes outside of Red Faction Guerilla or even Just Cause itself.