Backlog Beatdown: Being an Army of Two with Army of Two

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:

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.

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.

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!

Last Week's Games: Museum Rush, Colonization, Army of Two

I’m going to start this week by talking about a game I’d forgotten to mention in the previous one: Museum Rush. My brother bought this for my birthday, so Kirsty and I thought we’d give it a go. This is a delightful little game in which you play as thieves trying to steal exhibits from a museum by sneaking around, cracking codes, avoiding the guards and making as little noise as possible. The player who’s stolen the most valuable goods at the end of the game is the winner. The board is created by cards, so you get a different one each time, and it’s surprising how claustrophobic it can feel when you know one of your actions will trigger the guards! There are some advanced rules about the different characters you can play, stashing goods and buyers who will pay better than the standard rate for a certain piece of artwork, but we didn’t use these; they appear to be designed to add to the game mechanics and Kirsty and I thought it would be better to learn them first! I would raise some questions about the build quality of some of the components – the cards began to scuff almost straight away (and we were playing on a bed!) and the miniatures representing some of the thieves look like they’ll snap off their bases if somebody breathes on them too hard. But we had a good time with it! 

I spent a surprising amount of time playing Sid Meier’s Colonization. I’d this played before back in March; stopped playing for some reason and thought I’d give it another go. I’ve got quite a long way into the game now – roughly 10 hours – and I’m… well, I have no idea how I’m doing, to be honest, because there’s little means of measuring such things. I’m playing as the English this time (lead by Hugh Bonneville – see my previous coverage) and I’ve managed to establish seven or eight colonies around the middle of the map. Most of these I have taken from the French or the Dutch, and while the Dutch haven’t given me much trouble, the French have not taken the losses of their colonies lightly and they fight me tooth and nail to get them back. I seem to have remained friends with the Spanish so far – largely because they occupy the bottom third of the map that I don’t have a lot of interest in at this point. My colonies are up to a standard, which is just as well because I will be on the front line when the time comes to declare independence and hopefully defeat the European forces. I’m not able to do that yet though! I have no ships apart from your starting ship, and I doubt I have the numbers to repel a sustained attack. I wonder whether, in hindsight, I would have been better addressing some of the issues from the beginning – producing liberty bells, for example – but I haven’t come this far to start again. This time, win or lose, I hope to see it through until the end!

Finally, I played Army of Two on the Xbox 360. I bought this game in 2015 (I keep track of these things, what of it?) and played it for a while before getting in to something else. I didn’t touch it for a long time after that; it wasn’t that I didn’t enjoy it at all, but a modern military shooter just wasn’t what I was in to at that point. I’m enjoying it now, though. It’s a 3^rd person action game about a couple of private security mercenaries who get caught up in a conspiracy. It sounds quite generic and to a certain extent it is, but the game’s gimmick is the dynamic between you and your partner. You can use him to distract the enemy or attack them while you do the same, and unlike many AIs this one’s reasonably competent. He will take out enemies efficiently, not wait for you to do it. It’s been a fun game so far, and I’m not too far from the end now so we’ll see how it works out.

Until next week!