There are lots of reasons to be excited for Mercenaries 2; you can blow up entire city blocks with a tactical nuclear strike, you can utterly decimate the in-game ads, you can blow up literally everything but the rocks, the list goes on and on. Now you can add one more great feature to the explosive goodness: Pandemic has pulled back the curtain on the game’s co-op mode.

As is the trend nowadays, co-op play is utterly seamless, with a simple drop-in, drop-out mechanic allowing you to jump from one player to two and back again instantly. There are no menus or lobbies, you just set up your game to allow anyone to play, friends only or invites only, and you’re set. While a guest’s progress doesn’t count toward their own completion of the game’s storyline, they still get to keep all the cash and firearms, meaning that they can teleport back into their game with a nice new rocket launcher or machine gun and a fat stack of cash for their efforts. See, being a good friend can pay off in so many ways. Another nice feature - if one player dies, the other can go revive him and continue the mission, rather than having to restart from the beginning as you would in the single player campaign.

As for game adjustments, Pandemic says there are none, so co-op teams will face the same number of enemies and objectives as you would find in a single player game. This could be the only stumbling block for the game, as such a mechanic will likely make some areas way too easy with two players, while other missions might practically beg you to bring a partner. We’ll see how it all balances out once the game ships, but in any event, why fight alone when you can bring a friend to battle with you?