Army of Two Review

Army of Two was released with mild fanfare in March of 2008. The draw to the game was the dark humor, the weapon customization, and the focus on co-operative play. The unfortunate truth is that none of those features can really save this from the fact that it’s a bad game.

Let me start off by saying that I like this game. I think that it’s fun, hilarious, and overall a good time. That is, until you beat the story. This game was unfinished, unpolished, and way too short.

The controls are rather mediocre, and hard to approach. It’s simple to shoot, but overly complicated to switch your weapon. The layout has you button mashing, and is annoying at times. There are many times you realize that you are indeed playing a game, thereby ruining the immersion that many other games achieve.

The Graphics are actually not bad. They aren’t amazingly spectacular, except maybe in the cutscenes, which are rare. There is some detail to be seen, but it simply doesn’t shine, unless under close scrutiny. Overall, the graphics weren’t great, but they weren’t horrible, either.

The Gameplay leaves a lot to be desired. First off, it was impossible to shoot through even such materials as wood or sheet metal. The main focus of the game, as you might have guessed, is to work as a team of two. You and a (preferably human) partner must play through the missions and work together to complete objectives. Now, should one of you become unable to fight, you can try to heal your partner, or give up hope and run home crying. Whatever works. There are many points that require you to work together to complete objectives, ensuring that if you want to enjoy this game, you really need to know someone else that has it. There were several gameplay features originally promised, that were later dropped for various reasons. These include: piloting a tank, driving a jeep, a gun range where you could test weapons, and I’m assuming half the story.

The AI is terrible. If you aren’t playing with another human player, you might as well not play at all. They either don’t follow orders at all, or seem to intentionally run out into danger when they have low health. Don’t expect them to actually cover you either; they’re always conveniently reloading or just plain nowhere to be found.

The Game introduced the ‘Aggro’ system, which I have mixed feelings about. On one hand, it’s cool, but on the other, it punishes anyone that is trigger happy. The way it works, is that players shooting the most get focused on by enemies, whilst the other is practically invisible. This makes for some interesting teamwork if you are playing with a human player, but because the AI is so inept, expect computer teammates to stumble around stupidly while you literally become a walking target.

The story is rather bland, and cliché. For the game they seem to have mixed together badass mercenaries, various wisecracks, a plethora of dirty words, inappropriate fist-bumps, added a little political commentary and figured they were done. The story painstakingly shows cutscenes of the main characters kicking some serious ass, but you never get to play those missions. You have to assume that you just were really awesome, and though they seem like they would be really cool missions, you just have to fantasize about them.

The Guns are probably my favorite thing about this game. You can customize the hell out of them. There are different barrels, stocks, cartridges, suppressors, shields, front mounts, and you can even ‘pimp’ all of them. ‘Pimping’ a gun usually plates in with gold and platinum. While this really does nothing but make enemies want to kill you even more, it certainly looks cool. Unfortunately, getting to the weapon customization screens seems to be an exercise in patience. Primary, Secondary, and Special weapons are all in different menus, each with annoyingly long load times.

The sound is much like the rest of the game: average. While your ears are barraged by coarse black comedy amidst various things that go boom, there is really nothing notable to speak of. The same gunshots you might hear in any other game. The same explosions and the same enemies yelling. Not terrible, definitely not great.

The humor was dry and dark, and just how I liked it. I thought that they were crude jerks, but hilarious crude jerks. They would make just the wrong joke at the wrong time, but it was fantastic. I’m still in stitches every time I play. Unfortunately, most of the gamers who played this didn’t have a sense of humor, and it was one of the things that the game was most criticized on.

Overall, this game is mediocre. Forever doomed to be forgotten by the vast majority, until some random reminder pops up, and their brain tries it’s hardest to remember what the two dude’s names were. (It’s Tyson Rios and Elliot Salem, by the way) The Graphics, gameplay, sound, and story just weren’t incredible by any standard. You might notice that I neglected to mention the multiplayer aside from the story; truth is, it was so bad, I don’t like talking about it. You might have it tucked away in your game collection somewhere, but if you need to trade something in to get that next major title, Army of Two will be the first to go.

6.5/10 Masked mercenaries

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