“Army of Two” Impressions

March 23, 2008 2:37 am Sir Haxington Games for Fun, Gaming

I finished Army of Two a few night ago, and decided to write a little bit about it as I’m playing it some more on co-op.

I gotta admit, I’m a huge sucker for co-op games. I like playing together with other people more than playing against them. So, here we have Army of Two, a game built from the ground up to be a two co-op player game. However, I can’t say I’m a huge fan of the game. I think in general, it’s a game of missed opportunities.

Let me say what I like about the game. First, obviously, is co-op. Not many games even have co-op as an option, so it’s pretty ballsy to create a game that is built on the foundation of co-op. I’ve already played with with a couple of friends, and just being able to play with them makes the game fun to some degree. Second, I like being able to buy and upgrade weapons. I wish more shooters had weapons customization and upgrades. I also have to give them credit for making the weapons feel distinct. For example, the MP7, the minigun, the shotties, pistols, and so on, are all fun to use in different ways.

Okay, let’s talk about missed opportunities.

Let’s get the story out of the way since it’s the most obvious. The voice acting is some of the worst I’ve heard in a game in a long time. It’s due to a combination of a terrible story, characters you don’t really care about, pretty bad writing, and extraneous cursing. Army of Two could have gone super serious, or total comedy, but they went for both. Fuck. That. Shit.

Okay, so then you have a game that’s trying to do cover combat, but there’s simply not enough cover. There are plenty of examples where you enter into a combat situation with cover at inappropriate angles, or no cover at all. Usually the result is getting forced into a huge retreat or charging into enemy fire. Another gripe about cover, is that cover generally doesn’t protect you when healing your partner. So, your buddy goes down, you go up to heal him. If you were to take cover, you’d be safe. However, if you heal your buddy, even though you’re crouched and you look protected, you’re not, and you end up get worked over at the worst possible time. I have a sneaking suspicion it was to reinforce the use of the drag mechanic.

I know I said I liked the weapon customization, but there’s simply not enough of it. Many of the “cooler” weapons don’t have upgrade options besides “pimping” it, which everyone I’ve played with now thinks is silly. Common, let me get a larger clip for the stinger, or maybe it can be reloaded faster? Or a new stock for the MP7? Anything? And why offer suppressors for a game that doesn’t use stealth?

Shooting in the game feels a bit “off,” and the worst offender is when you’re sniping. In just about every other third person game where you snipe, you can line up your shot in the third person, zoom in through the scope, and your target will still be centered. That’s not the case in Army of Two. Lined up the perfect shot in the third person? Line it up again when you zoom in. And, it’s not a little off, it’s waaay off. This is a basic design principle for sniping that is being broken here. Oh, and the delay between pressing fire and your character actually firing is just long enough to be annoying, especially when using single shot weapons like the shotguns and pistols and AI are darting around all over the place.

Co-op parachuting and sniping is really contrived. Without going into too much detail, imagine two huge, heavily armored dudes. Now, imagine one of those guys is strapped to the other guys chest with a sniper rifle, and the other one has a parachute. I’ll leave it at that.

One of the most offending parts of the game is the how often you receive ammo. Basically, depending on what gun you shoot the most, enemies will drop that type of ammo. Sounds good in theory, right? Well, what ends up happening that guns that have a low max ammo count never get ammo dropped for them. So, say you just saved up for half the game and get to buy a grenade launcher. You’ll end up blowing through your nine grenades in an encounter or two, forcing you to switch to you secondary weapon, like a pistol or a sub-machinegun. Now, after you’ve fired 10 bullets from your secondary weapon, you’ll basically never get ammo for your grenade launcher for the rest of the (really long) level. Also, you basically never get sniper ammo for the duration of the level either. I know you get sniper ammo sometimes, but I don’t know how. I think I’ve only ever gotten more sniper ammo once. Maybe they did it for balance reasons?

I’m glossing over a lot more (I’m not really getting into AI, the drivable sections, the level design, or the cut-scenes). Oh. I think the parts where you get to carry guys was pretty cool, and the shield gameplay, which is sorta silly, is kinda fun. Except you can’t hit guys up close. I guess that why the shield guy has insta-kill melee. I think they could have done more unique things like that to spice up the game. Actually, now that I think of it, the game suffers from Frontlines-itis, where most of the gameplay is very similar, the enemies just get harder in each level.

So, even for all it’s faults, Army of Two was fun to play with friends. However, there’s so much that could be improved for the eventual sequel (which I’m sure I’ll end up playing because it has co-op).