I picked up Army of Two a few years ago, as I had downloaded
one of its sequels onto my Xbox 360 as part of the Games with Gold series. I usually
prefer to play games in sequence, and I wouldn’t have touched the later game
until I’d played and beaten the older two, so I bought the first game. It took
me a few years and a large gap in between to get to the end of it. Here’s what
I thought:
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| You know this dingus has had it... |
At first glance it looks like a generic war shooter of the
time. The colour scheme is brown/grey, the setting is contemporary, the weapons
are varied but have all the tropes of a modern military shooter – a pistol, a
standard weapon (shotguns etc) and a special weapon (sniper rifles, grenade launchers
etc) and the heroes are hulking badasses. What makes Army of Two different is
the interaction between the two characters. You can order your team mate to
hold their position, advance or stay on you, in either an aggressive or
defensive manner. This works because of the “heat” meter – the more aggressive
one of the characters is, the more attention they will draw from the enemy,
leaving their teammate to flank the enemy or attack them undisturbed. This is
the only game I’ve played with this kind of mechanic designed to work across
two people, and for the most part, it works quite well. The game was obviously designed
to work best with two players, but I wouldn’t know how well it works and the AI
worked well enough with the occasional fumble.
This is the unique feature of an otherwise standard game. The
two characters, Rios and Salem, fit their tropes – a scarred veteran with a
present moral standard and a swaggering mercenary in it for the money,
respectively. Their dialogue is well performed but could fit a “buddy”-style
comedy film as easily as a gritty war epic. The graphics are are competently designed
and do the job. The sound is good as well, the guns have a nice rattle to them,
and the background music plays its role of heightening the tension while not
sticking in the memory after the fact. The plot, though not particularly difficult
to predict, carries Army of Two across its campaign mode without outstaying its
welcome. And the game handles well enough. I could have been playing any game
with a similar theme and setting, and the AI control would be the only thing that
differentiated Army of Two.
And yet…
Somehow, I managed to stay engaged enough with Army of Two
to see it through to the end. I was interested enough with the plot to want to
see how it turned out. I enjoyed shooting enough to want to keep playing
through the frustratingly difficult sections. I liked buying equipment enough
to want to collect the entire set of weapons and masks (though I’ll need a
couple of goes with it to do this!) It took me a while to get going, but once I
did, I was determined to see it through to the end.
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| Can you tell which is Rios, and which is Salem? |
Overall, I enjoyed the experience, though I do feel the game
wobbled with its final boss. The problem with military shooters is that as they
have a contemporary setting in whatever fetid standards pass for realism at the
time of development, they can’t really do anything extra with a villain – we’re
all human, after all. Other games get around this in various ways. Quick time events
are rarely welcome, but they work. Giving the enemy and the player something extra
to do in the environment helps as well. Even a larger amount of health would be
different, though it would require some suspension of disbelief. With Army of
Two, there’s nothing to differentiate what you’re doing with the final boss to the
same cover-based shooting you’ve been doing all through the game. It didn’t
spoil the playthrough, and I do recommend at least trying the partner mechanics
if you want to do something a bit different with guns, but if you’ve been
playing military shooters as your go-to for the last couple of generations, you’ll
probably want something a little more.
Final Score: 3/5:
Worth a look.
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