Army of Two Review

Written by: Darren Cartledge Posted: 17th March 2008

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Who needs a one man army when you can have an Army of Two.

Army of Two Details:

	Action
	PlayStation 3/Xbox 360
	EA Montreal
	EA Games

18+

Out Now

N/A

The new generation of consoles have really helped social gaming gain in popularity, so when EA announced Army of Two was to be a co-operative action shooter it was important that they got things right and for the most part they’ve done a good job!

Army of Two puts you in control of a US Army Ranger who along with his partner decides to leave the army in order to work for a Private Military Company and earn big money. The games story focuses on the ethical debate of these companies profiting from military operations. The games two characters start to work for SSC who undertake operations for various governments, however it soon transpires that you may not be fighting for the good guys.

Missions in the game feature the usual combat style objectives you would expect to find in an action shooter, eliminate a terrorist, destroy deadly weapons and recover intelligence, all before heading home for a bite to eat.

The game makes you and your partner work together, certain areas of the games environments can only be reached by helping each other out. Also its pretty hard to run through missions simply blasting enemies, if you take a sustained number of hits you will fall in battle and have to wait for your team mate to come and drag you out of trouble, literally! The best way to approach the game is team work, the game features an AGGRO system which basically means the more aggressive player becomes the target of enemy aggression. This allows the other player to move forward and take out emplaced enemies and refocus the enemy’s aggression whilst the other player moves forward.

If a player stays as the more aggressive for a sustained amount of time you can enter overkill. Overkill heightens the characters abilities and slows down time allowing you to move through the battlefield and kill a considerable number of enemies.

During each mission you are equipped with three weapons, you can purchase more and upgrade them, as well as pimp them up by visiting weapon dealers at the beginning of new missions or at a mission’s midway point, also to add further diversity to your arsenal you can swap weapons with your partner at anytime.

Army of Two features a campaign that can be played on public servers or privately so you and a friend can play together. The games campaign can also be played in a single player mode in which you are partnered with an AI controlled character. For the most part the game’s AI is good, although it’s not perfect! When playing with an AI partner you can issue orders by pressing one of the four directions on the d-pad, pressing the same direction twice will switch your partner from passive mode to aggressive so you have direct control over which one of you is playing which role.

Most of the time the games order system works well, there are some flaws, I often found that my AI controlled partner didn’t like to stray to far from me when ordered to advance so I often left him to be the more aggressive, which he occasionally didn’t get right leaving me vulnerable to enemy aggression. To make things worse, when I was incapacitated by an enemy, my AI controlled friend would often drag me through hordes of enemies and directly into the line of fire, luckily you when you are being dragged around the battlefield in the hope of being revived you are still able to fire your gun.

Army of Two also allows a co-op snipe mode during missions, this allows you to take out multiple targets at once, but for the most part it’s an under used feature and more often then not alerts even more enemies to your presence., If you are being attacked by multiple enemies from various directions, the game also places you in back to back mode, again time is slowed down and ammunition become unlimited as you blast away at swarms of enemies, whilst it sounds good it does have a very scripted feel to it.

Despite the flaws with the games AI, Army of Two still provides an enjoyable playing experience, especially when played how the game was intended, co-operatively with another real player!

The game also offers a pretty good challenge; enemies aren’t dumb and will seek cover and move positions. They will even fire from different points of their cover and occasionally advance on your position. However despite this progress through the game is fairly rapid and sadly the game is only 5 or 6 missions long so the campaign can be over before you know it!

As with most games you are required to interact with games environment at various times this is a simple process of hitting the games action button, and then watching as a mini cut-scene plays out the action. This is how many of the abilities of your characters are handled, and to be honest it spoils the game some what giving it an automatic feeling.

As with most shooter games Army of Two features vehicle action in the form of getting behind the controls of a hovercraft. This has been done well, although there’s not really any challenge as the vehicle glides around the environment effortlessly making the controls very easy to get to grips with, unlike in some other action orientated games.

Adding to the replay value of Army of Two is the games “Versus” mode. Three different game types are included in the games “Versus” mode, these are bounties, warzone and extraction. Each mode pits squads of two men against each other in maps filled with AI controlled enemy players. The aim in each mode is to earn more money then the rival squad; this is done by killing hostiles and completing objectives such as planting bombs or rescuing hostages.

Visually the game looks good characters feature a lot of detail whilst the games environments although small are highly detailed and when enemies fall they do so in a realistic way. Both version of the game look pretty much the same, although the PlayStation 3 version does seem a little sharper then the Xbox 360 version.

Sound in the game is of good quality, the games sound fits perfectly while gun fire sounds good. Voice acting is fairly good although from the dialogue you get the feeling the developers didn’t really take the game very seriously as one of the characters constantly goes on about “getting paid” while the other likes to talk about conspiracy’s.

Despite its weaknesses and the overall shortness of the campaign Army of Two is a pretty solid game and is very enjoyable to play and far better then some third person shooters available. It could have done without the pointless auto sections and last a little longer, yet it is still recommended to fans of action shooters, who could do far worse.