Army of Two: The 40th Day (Xbox 360)
Genre: Third-Person Action Publisher: Electronic Arts Developer: EA Montreal Players: 2-10
Sitting down with the second instalment offers immediate relief from the memories of the former; it’s a good looking beast, and once the story kicks in the destruction you witness is on a scale that's both impressive and shuddering. Shanghai is under attack, and Salem and Rios, our two protagonists, are stuck right in the middle. As skyscrapers tumble to the ground and flames lick the sides of those left standing, the duo must battle against an unknown army to free themselves, and perhaps the city, from the assault.
In the spirit of things, I got stuck right into the co-op side of the game with a long-time co-op mate, whacked the game on the hardest difficulty (Contractor) and got stuck in. An hour later, we’d turned it off and I decided I’d go it alone. Why? Because it was so stupidly put together it threw an obstacle in the way of just about everything the player wanted to do. Don’t get me wrong, I totally dig difficulty settings that kick the player repeatedly in the swingers but it wasn’t the difficulty curve that was the annoying thing. No, reader, it was everything else.
Getting shot in the face and having an enemy come up to you and break your neck because your team mate can’t reach you in time is fine. Having to sit through the same cutscene every time you die, without being able to skip, is not. It's one of those decisions that boggles the mind, because I fail to see how making the player experience something so irritating, so soul-destroying could ever have been considered a good idea. Yes indeed it's hardly the worst complaint in the world but it's there right from the start, and right the way through.
Beyond that fact, the actual team play is flawed despite obvious efforts being put into making it feel natural. As mentioned, you can revive a downed teammate if you can get to them in time, and with a sense of predictability, often you must take separate paths to achieve an objective. That’s all well and good, but the same issue of cutscene repetition rears its ugly head every time you die and can’t be reached by the other player, which is often when you must part ways. Other things you can do are get behind your teammate as they wield a shield, provide cover for sniping, or interestingly, pretend to surrender to enemies and then have the other half of the team eliminate them from a sniper position. How active you are to the enemy is again represented by the Aggro meter – as one of the two lays down fire, a bar at the top of the screen climbs, eventually peaking out in a blaze of flame. This indicates that any enemies in the area have their attention firmly on that person, allowing the other player, who is now cloaked in a blue tint, to flank or snipe. It works well and did as it was supposed to most of the time.
There is a Camaraderie and a Morality system, although I don’t see anything it’s used for. To raise Camaraderie you can back slap each other, compliment your partner and so on, or play a jovial game of Rock, Paper, Scissors – funny the first time you try, not so much every time you accidentally do it. The morality system is easier to see in effect, because at various points through the adventure you must make choices, and while most of them are straightforward – kill the endangered animal and get the gun, don’t and don’t – occasionally the sequence of stills showing the result of your actions tends to veer away from what you would have expected. For the most part the morality options are as clear as day and offer no real complexity or dramatic impact.
How the morality system is implemented in terms of adjusting the gameplay throughout, I don’t know. The only apparent effect I came across was because I hadn’t saved enough civilians by the end (who you come across in set pieces and must liberate, not unlike the slow-mo, breaching-a-room sections of Modern Warfare 2) and was subsequently informed that because of my lax nature I wasn’t getting any help in the final firefight.
Combat is somewhat rewarding, in an old school kinda way. The bullet streams are entirely visible, making it feel like an early 90s shooter, and there is a reasonably large roster of weapons on offer. The game boasts having The Most Detailed Customisation Options For Weapons in a Video Game, Ever although in reality you can blast through the entire game with the gun you started out with, by simply whacking on some additions - new stock, barrel, front mount, and so forth. Enemies are hardly geniuses, offering their heads like melons to be popped throughout the entire playthrough. There are plenty of them though, so you tend to do plenty of shootin’.
So far it’s only really the visuals that are keeping this from being utter mediocrity, but by the time you realise that the sieve-like plot is being hampered further still by the unavailability of some simple menu options and things really start falling apart. The game’s default audio levels mean that you must crank the volume to hear what anyone is saying and then shudder in agony as an explosion tears through your eardrums like a hammer to the head. You can’t adjust the volume levels for music, SFX and speech, and you can’t enable subtitles.
Boss battles feel like they belong in a side scrolling platformer from the 80s like Rush’n Attack, being entirely forgettable, and as there are only two or three basic soldier types throughout, it’s always more of the same. As a side note, the enemies reminded me of the Action Force/GI Joe Cobra army, although whether that's good or bad will depend on if you have warm fuzzy memories of playing with those particular toys as a kid, and not lumps of coal.
Multiplayer is perhaps not as bad as all the rest, because it eliminates many of the flaws that beset the main game. Cutscenes are eliminated, and so too are many of the problems to do with variety, and AI. It’s actually quite fun but whether it will pull enough people away from MW2 or the imminent Bad Company 2 is a valid query. No, would be our answer. If you had a preorder down then you get access to the Extraction game mode – where you fight wave after wave of enemies – but if not then you have to wait a month to play it.
While Army of Two: The 40th Day is presented well, the reasonably impressive imagery is propped up on a bristling pillar of small problems, oversights, and clumsiness. The biggest problem though remains that as a co-op game - in a world which is paying more and more attention to that buddy mechanic - it’s often easier to get enjoyment out of the single player.
By Keith B (24th Jan 2010)
Although respectably better than the original in most areas, the much-vaunted cooperative gameplay is far from perfect.
There's something about co-op gameplay that I really enjoy, where you can try and employ specific tactics to achieve an objective rather than being called a lolfag every two minutes while half your team teleports across the map because of chronic lag issues. There is something about two or four people getting together and working towards a similar end, and therefore I was keen to put Army of Two: The 40th Day through its paces. It’s unfortunate then that the single player is better in execution than the cooperative element.
Let’s go back through the sands of time though for a moment. I didn’t play very much of the first game, although I did tinker around with it. I found it far too clunky to devote any real time or effort into, not helped by the fact I also ran into it months and months after it was released, and just couldn’t fall in love with the dated presentation, among other things.
Sitting down with the second instalment offers immediate relief from the memories of the former; it’s a good looking beast, and once the story kicks in the destruction you witness is on a scale that's both impressive and shuddering. Shanghai is under attack, and Salem and Rios, our two protagonists, are stuck right in the middle. As skyscrapers tumble to the ground and flames lick the sides of those left standing, the duo must battle against an unknown army to free themselves, and perhaps the city, from the assault.
In the spirit of things, I got stuck right into the co-op side of the game with a long-time co-op mate, whacked the game on the hardest difficulty (Contractor) and got stuck in. An hour later, we’d turned it off and I decided I’d go it alone. Why? Because it was so stupidly put together it threw an obstacle in the way of just about everything the player wanted to do. Don’t get me wrong, I totally dig difficulty settings that kick the player repeatedly in the swingers but it wasn’t the difficulty curve that was the annoying thing. No, reader, it was everything else.
Getting shot in the face and having an enemy come up to you and break your neck because your team mate can’t reach you in time is fine. Having to sit through the same cutscene every time you die, without being able to skip, is not. It's one of those decisions that boggles the mind, because I fail to see how making the player experience something so irritating, so soul-destroying could ever have been considered a good idea. Yes indeed it's hardly the worst complaint in the world but it's there right from the start, and right the way through.
Beyond that fact, the actual team play is flawed despite obvious efforts being put into making it feel natural. As mentioned, you can revive a downed teammate if you can get to them in time, and with a sense of predictability, often you must take separate paths to achieve an objective. That’s all well and good, but the same issue of cutscene repetition rears its ugly head every time you die and can’t be reached by the other player, which is often when you must part ways. Other things you can do are get behind your teammate as they wield a shield, provide cover for sniping, or interestingly, pretend to surrender to enemies and then have the other half of the team eliminate them from a sniper position. How active you are to the enemy is again represented by the Aggro meter – as one of the two lays down fire, a bar at the top of the screen climbs, eventually peaking out in a blaze of flame. This indicates that any enemies in the area have their attention firmly on that person, allowing the other player, who is now cloaked in a blue tint, to flank or snipe. It works well and did as it was supposed to most of the time.
There is a Camaraderie and a Morality system, although I don’t see anything it’s used for. To raise Camaraderie you can back slap each other, compliment your partner and so on, or play a jovial game of Rock, Paper, Scissors – funny the first time you try, not so much every time you accidentally do it. The morality system is easier to see in effect, because at various points through the adventure you must make choices, and while most of them are straightforward – kill the endangered animal and get the gun, don’t and don’t – occasionally the sequence of stills showing the result of your actions tends to veer away from what you would have expected. For the most part the morality options are as clear as day and offer no real complexity or dramatic impact.
How the morality system is implemented in terms of adjusting the gameplay throughout, I don’t know. The only apparent effect I came across was because I hadn’t saved enough civilians by the end (who you come across in set pieces and must liberate, not unlike the slow-mo, breaching-a-room sections of Modern Warfare 2) and was subsequently informed that because of my lax nature I wasn’t getting any help in the final firefight.
Combat is somewhat rewarding, in an old school kinda way. The bullet streams are entirely visible, making it feel like an early 90s shooter, and there is a reasonably large roster of weapons on offer. The game boasts having The Most Detailed Customisation Options For Weapons in a Video Game, Ever although in reality you can blast through the entire game with the gun you started out with, by simply whacking on some additions - new stock, barrel, front mount, and so forth. Enemies are hardly geniuses, offering their heads like melons to be popped throughout the entire playthrough. There are plenty of them though, so you tend to do plenty of shootin’.
So far it’s only really the visuals that are keeping this from being utter mediocrity, but by the time you realise that the sieve-like plot is being hampered further still by the unavailability of some simple menu options and things really start falling apart. The game’s default audio levels mean that you must crank the volume to hear what anyone is saying and then shudder in agony as an explosion tears through your eardrums like a hammer to the head. You can’t adjust the volume levels for music, SFX and speech, and you can’t enable subtitles.
Boss battles feel like they belong in a side scrolling platformer from the 80s like Rush’n Attack, being entirely forgettable, and as there are only two or three basic soldier types throughout, it’s always more of the same. As a side note, the enemies reminded me of the Action Force/GI Joe Cobra army, although whether that's good or bad will depend on if you have warm fuzzy memories of playing with those particular toys as a kid, and not lumps of coal.
Multiplayer is perhaps not as bad as all the rest, because it eliminates many of the flaws that beset the main game. Cutscenes are eliminated, and so too are many of the problems to do with variety, and AI. It’s actually quite fun but whether it will pull enough people away from MW2 or the imminent Bad Company 2 is a valid query. No, would be our answer. If you had a preorder down then you get access to the Extraction game mode – where you fight wave after wave of enemies – but if not then you have to wait a month to play it.
While Army of Two: The 40th Day is presented well, the reasonably impressive imagery is propped up on a bristling pillar of small problems, oversights, and clumsiness. The biggest problem though remains that as a co-op game - in a world which is paying more and more attention to that buddy mechanic - it’s often easier to get enjoyment out of the single player.
6.9
Single Play
6.8
Friend Play
7.0
Multi Play
7.4
Graphics
8.8
Sound
5.4
Challenge
7.1
Entertainment
7.5
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Army of Two: The 40th Day
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Army of Two: The 40th Day (X360)
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we say:
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