Army of Two, a story about two men in post-military positions who become part of a Hired Mercenary Corporation. It has been recorded numerous times in history that Small Offensive Military groups are more successful that large scale battles.
In light of this, there has been a massive push into privatised military and Mercenary groups have become legitimate companies.
Army of Two follows the success of two Military men caught in a political tangle and put their 2 cents in the only way they know how: Through someone's head. With a bullet.
The game system starts off seeming like your a-typical over-the-shoulder shooter, AKA: Third Person, blazing away with Modern Weapons that you can upgrade along the way, along with choosing your outset of armour, and a variety of Styled masks to make your character look more threatening than usual.
To expand on this, they added in a second player character. This IS after all Army of TWO. So now you have two characters running about, one either a friend or a computer AI, guns blazing, scaring people with their face plates, and generally tearing shit up.
But that's not enough. Having two guys run about would be silly because they could take different routes and generally linchpin any silly bugger who waits at the end. So the developers made it worth the value of having two people actually staying together.
This is where they made the Aggro system. As one player kills more and more enemies in quick succession, the enemies take him under higher priority, being considered a more dangerous target, and thus drawing fire away from the other player. This is shown by a Red Glow emanating from the character.
So where does this leave the other player? Oh, he's running around to the back of the enemies to smack them across the head, or shoot them in the back of the head. Or, the smart bastard is standing in front of you holding some sort of impromptu shield, such as a car door, as you wade through the poor saps trying to shoot the pair of you down.
As one glows more red, the other becomes more and more invisible. When the Aggro meter reaches its maximum, the players enter Overkill mode. For the next 15 seconds in bullet time, the player with all the Aggro has infinite ammo in his current clip and takes less damage, while his partner runs around faster than normal whacking opponents across the head.
Naturally you're given two weapons as well, a primary and a secondary weapon. Now, they make a very big distinction about this by having your primary weapon being your “Fuck off” gun and your secondary being a piddly gun of annoyance, such as a pistol or Sub Machine gun.
You can pick and choose what weapon you want to use based on the stats available on the actual weapons themselves, including the Aggro stat. The higher the Aggro, the more threatening it is, hence the more Aggro you generate. The gun with the most Aggro is the "Fuck off" Chaingun. It's not called that but it's a Chaingun and, frankly, "Fuck off" is a good warning.
And you can upgrade these stats as well by attaching various parts, such as shield, under slung shotgun or grenade attachments, or simply pimping it out by plating it with silver and/or gold, and maybe even some lovely woodgrain. That's right, you can pimp out your “Fuck off” Chaingun with gold barrels and a wooden stock.
So far, I've been talking about the good stuff of this game. So lets make a point about the bad side of the game.
The basic storyline is good. Personally, however, I would've preferred if it was spread out a bit more since the overall campaign is rather quick, a good 10-15 hours of gameplay on the first run through.
The game also has a fast pace going for it, however the controls feel clumsy and players are bound to do things that weren't originally intended, such as moving in or out of cover or simply having a hard time shooting something/someone.
Overall, it's a very entertaining game. Some of my favourite parts is when they do the back to back. It's scripted, so you can't pull it out whenever you want, though it would be cool to wade through a level while in back to back. Everything gets into a bullet time and the players just rotate around and shoot people running at them.
Mid last month they released the Sequel, Army of Two: 40th Day. Why didn't I know about this?! I gotta pick up a copy of this!
“Okay, this looks pretty cool. I hope the rest of the game isn't as frantic as this, it'll give me a headache for sure.
“Ah, it's settled down. This looks pretty good, the scenery is well defined, the glare is working well. I don't like how they changed the scar across Rios' face, but Salem looks alright with hair. It looks like mine when I grow it out. They changed their voices too, only slightly. Must just be because of different recording gear.”
“Oh man, the controls are so much smoother. This makes me happy. Oh, what's this? What does this tooltip say? Press the... I think that's L3 button... to alternate...” * Press L3 Button and the camera swaps side of the character * “OH THANK THE PINEAPPLE PASHING BASTARD WHO ACTUALLY KNEW THAT THIS WAS NECESSARY! THANK FUCK HE HAS GOOD TASTE!”
These were my first thoughts that ran through my mind when I began playing The 40th Day after playing Army of Two for a few hours. The whole game is a massive improvement in a variety of aspects, many of which I listed above. Especially the camera angle. Army of Two didn't give players the option of changing the angle of the camera in relation to your character unless you were sidled up against a wall the wrong way. And even then it didn't always work and you would be flooded by terrorists and their bullets without any chance of retaliation until you sat down waiting for your partner to heal you. The problem afterwards would be that the AI would try and take you to a safe place on the other side of the map, while the countdown timer to a detonating missile would casually stroll down the minute it was given. All because you couldn't see.
They added in another aspect into the game: Morality! Which pretty much comes down to the choice to kill ruthlessly or to not kill ruthlessly. The first morality choice was to kill a contact or not, and I was going to go the good route but my fingers got ahead of my brain and I shot the poor bugger. It was a pretty awesome scene, because he took the bullet to the head, staggered, then turned around to strangle Rios. Rios then forces him off, shoots him in the chest a few more times before kicking him through the railing, and down into an alleyway from the top of a building. As a moment of reflection, a comic book montage rolls and shows him falling, hitting a wall before landing dead, and then showing his face on a missing persons report, all to say “This is what you've done, you horrible person.” Since then I've been taking the immoral road and it has been pretty harsh. Stray Bullets, termination of a Species, and I've still got more to come.
The story itself... well I'm not sure where it's actually headed. It could be that I just turned off my brain and just went through guns blazing half the time, and secretly getting a headache from straining my eyes because my TV is too old, but so far all I've been able to follow is that we were on a job which went pear shaped when Shanghai began to get bombed. Then we found ourselves shifting between buildings, going up and down stairs, walking down the side of a fallen building, saving their operations girl, and going back-to-back on a platform being lowered by a crane to get to street level. I just know that some organisation is invading for some reason or another.
This is the first and second Chapters.
I'm really enjoying this game. I can't wait to get back to it.
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