Army of Two

"Fun For Two Players, But With Some Easily Avoidable Flaws"

I admit it: I'm in my 50's and I play video games with my teenage daughter. We like games we can play together, such as the Halo games and the split-screen part of Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow. So when we saw Army of Two we knew we had to try it. Note that this review is only of the two-player version; neither of us played it solo with the AI.

One of the most fun things about this game is the way these two guys carry on at each other. They bicker like an old married couple; in other words, they're really close. They're more like brothers than business partners. We frequently had to pause the game so we could stop laughing. The two characters are Tyson Rios and Elliott Salem, mercenary soldiers working for a private military corporation. One of the big sub-plots involves the question of privatizing the military; can corporations do a better job of national defense than the government? We see a couple of senators squaring off in the media over a bill to make it happen. Rios and Salem find themselves in various hot spots around the world, doing everything from hostage rescue to tracking down and taking out terrorists. They're in it for the money; with every mission success their bank accounts grow, and at various times they can go shopping for weapons and other gear. Weapons are rated for damage, accuracy, ammo capacity, and "Aggro." "Aggro" is short for "aggressiveness" (I notice that at least one other reviewer didn't read the booklet to find that out, and also didn't pay attention to how to spell it). Basically, it means shooting a lot to get the enemy's attention. When the attention is focused on the member with aggro, the other member becomes virtually invisible and can slip around to flank the bad guys and take them out.

You have four equipped weapon options: a primary weapon, usually a machine gun or assault rifle, a secondary weapon, which starts out as a pistol but you can buy something more effective, a sniper weapon, and grenades. As you take out enemies, they occasionally drop ammo bags that you can pick up to replenish your own ammunition on the fly. The system for selecting your current weapon is a little strange: you hold the left bumper to bring up a wheel that shows what you have, then use the D-pad to select the weapon you want. This is a mistake, because the D-pads on these controllers are usually inaccurate pieces of crap. It's also awkward to do because both controls are on the same hand. But that's a minor quibble.

Still, it brings me to the biggest problem with this game: the controls. Several are counter-intuitive and take a LOT of getting used to. I already mentioned the weapon selection; another is the way the crouch function works. If you crouch near something, apparently you're automatically in cover. But there's nothing to tell you that unless you fire at the bad guys and notice that your character is reaching up and firing over whatever you're crouched by. Another big problem is the fact that there are certain things over which you have no control at all. The guys can do what's called Back-To-Back when they're surrounded by enemies; when you go into Back-To-Back you don't have to reload your weapon. You can just keep firing. But you can only use Back-To-Back when the game decides you should. There were several places where it would have been nice to be able to go into that mode, because as often as not you have enemies coming at you from every conceivable direction. Another control problem comes when one of you picks up a riot shield and you both crouch behind it. If you're the guy in back, you can fire over the shield, but you can't use your iron sight (left trigger) to gain better accuracy or it takes you out from behind the shield. Huh??? Then there are the cooperative actions: opening a door, working dual controls, that sort of thing. You come up to the obstacle, both get in place, and press the A button. Fine. But you can't just do the action. It has to go to a cut scene that shows them doing whatever it is. Some of these cut scenes are only a second or two long, and they make the game feel horribly disjointed. In fact, there are far too many cut scenes in the game as a whole. The worst comes at the end of the game. I won't spoil it for you, but you and your gaming partner don't get to take out the main bad guys; that happens in an extended cut scene. That was thoroughly unsatisfying.

The "shopping" comes at the beginning of each mission, and on occasion you can do mid-mission shopping. This is fun, but the weapon selection could have been a lot better, and some of the "upgrades" on the weapons are just nonsensical. The dumbest is choosing a "pimped" option, which makes the weapon nice and flashy, and in real life would make you a much better target for the enemy. Things like different stocks and grips for better accuracy, bigger ammo magazines and better sights are a much more effective investment. I suppose young kids and teenagers who pour all their money into their cars might enjoy the pimping option, but I don't know who else would.

At times the game doesn't play fair. In particular, enemies can materialize out of nowhere, and I can almost describe the way some of the sequences were programmed. Too often you see a foe show up behind, say, a crate, and you shoot him. Suddenly there's another one in the same spot. You shoot him. There's another. If you watch carefully, you can see them running to that spot, but there's no way to tell where they came from because there's noplace they could have come from. What we're looking at here is a program that says "We have X number of enemies and they go here, here, here and here." That, to me, shows quite a lack of imagination. It's also often difficult to get a bead on an enemy, even with the more accurate aim option.

Your enemies are color-coded. That was something new to me. But each character has an insignia over his head, and the bad guys' markers have different colors depending on how much body armor they're wearing. If you see a green one, HIDE! He's heavily armored, and you can only take him down by one of you getting aggro - read, run around in front of him and let him shoot you to pieces - while the other sneaks around and shoots him several times from behind. These guys are tough, but it's kind of fun figuring out how to take them down.

The flaws in this game could have been avoided easily, simply by adopting some more standardized controls and putting a little more thought into some of the sequences. In particular, the cut scenes for the cooperative actions scream "Low Budget." Still, it's a lot of fun even if it gets frustrating at times. Pick it up used from your favorite game store, grab your favorite gaming buddy, and give it a workout. As far as I'm concerned it doesn't really have replay value, but once through will keep you occupied for a while.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 06/15/09

Game Release: Army of Two (US, 03/06/08)