Army of Two was a nice third person shooter at the time of its appearance, in March 2008. The game was mad, based on the coop and has served to those of you who needed to do headshots in couple. The EA Montreal members had to develop a continuation and it came out a second edition which is revised, corrected and enlarged. The game is located in Shanghai, where a terrorist group called the 40th Day, makes everything it wants in the city and there is no one to stop it tell the members in the clan that there’s no good nor nice what they are doing. And what would a Shanghai mean without the two Brokeback Mountain-like: Tyson Rios and Elliot Salem? These mercenaries proceed this time to China, where it starts the Apocalypse.
They are willing to kill anyone for a few dollars and now they are in Shanghai for a quick mission and very lucrative. They have done a good job and the city quickly falls prey to chaos. From the terrace house where they have just killed some people, the two guys assist with their mouths opened under their masks at a military attack of a scale unseen before. A rain of rockets heads over to the city and destroys buildings that are made mostly of wood, transforming everything into ash and smoke.
The blocks fall, the people scream like from the mouth of a snake and run where they see with their eyes, helicopters fly over the area, tanks rumble. Trapped in the inferno of smoke and flame, our guys do not have anything better to do than to uncover the hottest weapons and to make their way among the ruins invaded by hordes of soldiers. The only solution is to run saving your life and trying to escape the city, leaving piles of corpses everywhere you go. That’s about the script of Army of Two: The 40th Day game which is strongly oriented to action, filled with cinematic scenes.
As a clone of Gears of War, Army of Two begins in the fire of the action and the progression is made under cover, the bullets flying in the air hitting any suspicious figure. Our partner’s AI in single player is skillful and responsive. In fact, the game is very faithful to its ancestor, but some novelties are emerging in this episode. Here appears a display system that can be used more easily to spot and to give “lock” on the targets. Dynamic and highly readable, this feature is accessible through a simple click and allows you to easily see the environment and ease the action.
Like mercenaries that get respected everywhere they go, Rios and Salem accumulate dollars as they pass through Shanghai, currency with which you can customize the weapons, the purchasing system and the modifying system being restructured. Slightly more practical and accessible, it allows you to customize a piece by piece a tool that seems completely destroyed: assault rifle, Uzi, rocket launcher, grenades, the choice is wide.
For each weapon you can many choices and you can adjust your playing style. Do you like to get into your opponents like in cheese? Great, simply equip yourself with a shotgun and shield. Are you an adept of the snipers? Get a sniper rifle. The customization is very nice and also brings huge advantages to the game, especially since it offers all sorts of fantasies, such as paints with different models.
Outside the economic system, there are phases in which moral choices are involved, often including the death (or not) of a minor character: for example, protect a child or throw it in the middle of the fight, kill an endangered tiger to make ammunition or let it alive, rescue civilians became hostages and collect a good sum of money. The consequences of your choices will have an equal effect on the running of the game and on some secondary characters.
Like we all know from the famous advertising to a famous cognac, the union is power, and the game is presented very well in terms of cooperation between the two. Even if the characters sometimes leave the impression of elephants disguised in Dolph Lundgren, thanks to the slow movement, the producers have included several moves that you can run in the coop mode, as simultaneous shootings, which can eliminate two targets without opponents to have time to trigger the alarm. In the same perspective, the false teaching helps you to fool your opponents by pretending that you teach them, then kill them quickly.
The battles are very convincing, the first-episode being scrupulously observed: if one of the teammates creates a diversion, the others block the opponents by surprise; if your mate continually shoots the opponent, this will see it as the main threat, which will focus the attention on it. The level design is created for this kind of approach and provides many situations and flanking opportunities. The levels are well designed, so you will not get bored especially with the open areas that this game has to offer. This elaborate design eliminates the appearance of artificially prepared levels and boredom that might have been installed in the first Army of Two.
The friendship between the characters is carried to paroxysm through the system of congratulation or censure that influence the relations between the two. The producers have brought up the cooperation to a level that has developed a game of rock / paper / scissors that you can start anytime between those two characters. Because the people at EA Montreal insisted too much in the first episode on the harsh words with which the two characters insluted themselves, now the insults are something far rarer and better placed.
