Last Week's Games: Crash Bandicoot 2, 8-Bit Armies, Army of Two

Not 100% sure I've got the right game here...

As you might expect, on Christmas week there hasn’t been a massive amount of time for playing games. I managed to have a couple of goes with Crash Bandicoot 2: the Wrath of Cortex on the PlayStation 4, as part of the N-Sane trilogy. Some of you might remember I played through the original Crash Bandicoot over the summer, and I knew I was going to be busy, so I didn’t fancy picking up another long-form RPG I wasn’t going to have time to beat! Crash Bandicoot 2 was a typical sequel of its time; same as before, but slightly better. In this case Crash has a few new moves: A power slide, a crawl and a belly slam attack. He is on a quest to find a selection of crystals for Dr N. Cortex, the villain of the previous game; I’m only up to the third set of levels so far but I don’t get the feeling that this association is going to end well! I’m having a decent amount of fun with it so far and will probably see it through to the end, frustrating though the difficulty can very often be, but I doubt I will go for 100% completion.

An army in luminescent green, if you can believe that...

I also played a game on my laptop that I hadn’t played for a good couple of years: 8-Bit Armies. I played this game in 2017, got a few levels in to it and for some reason didn’t touch it again after that, which was a shame because it was pretty good, if a little basic in delivery. It’s a real-time strategy game with an 8-bit aesthetic, which basically translates to: “All the models have blocky textures.” Each level is fairly short and has its own gimmick and objective, which suits me fine as it means I don’t necessarily have to be playing the game for hours before I get to the next bit! I particularly enjoyed the level where the two bases are separated by an erupting volcano, which your infantry will find it very difficult to survive. I therefore had to attack the enemy base using nothing but tanks and armoured cars, and the game moves quickly enough that I could send multiple waves of units in sequence. I might see this game through to the end, I might not, but I’m even less likely to go back through the game and try to obtain all the achievement challenges for it; it’s good, but not that good!

Not that easy to tell Rios and Salem
apart once their masks are down.

Finally I got to the end of a game I started in 2015: Army of Two. I’ve had a bit of an on-off relationship with this particular game. I’m pretty sure the only reason I bought it was because at some point I’d downloaded one of its sequels onto my Xbox 360 as part of the Games with Gold scheme and wanted to play the games in sequence. It was a war shooter that I didn’t find particularly engaging at that point in my life, and when a lot of things changed for me in a very short space of time, I wasn’t inclined to return to it. Then, over last summer, I thought I’d give it another go. I got up to roughly three quarters of the way through the game when my Xbox 360 broke, and I couldn’t get the controller to connect. So Army of Two was put to bed for a while, but I wanted to finish it off since I want to beat as many games as I can before the end of the year. I finally managed it late on Monday evening. I’m hoping to write a review about it that may or may not come out this Friday; it’s going to be a tough one to call though. Surely a game it took me years to find the time to beat shouldn’t get too high a score, but when I was playing it, I really enjoyed it. It has the interesting partner mechanics, tells a standard but workable story and the difficult sections weren’t too frustrating. I might come back to the game to beat it on a higher difficulty, but not just yet, I’ve got other games that need playing!