We’ve been waiting for it and it finally arrived on March 4th, 2008. Yes, after being delayed multiple times, EA’s Army of Twowas officially released to the public. I rented the game over the weekend so here are my impressions on EA’s latest shooter.

In short: A really good rental to play with a friend as this game is built with coop in mind.

To be honest, I’m a big fan of cooperative games. I enjoyed playing some of them on Xbox360 with our dear Webmaster Robocrotch. We played Gears of War, Rainbow Six: Vegas and Halo 3 and GoW was probably the best cooperative experience between all these games. When I heard that EA was developing a game focused on coop (Army of Two), I was excited! The game was delayed multiple times because it needed some polishing and that “extra” time they got, helped a lot.

You start by incarnating Elliot Salem or Tyson Rios (you cannot change your selection once done but other than physical differences, they are both the same.) Both of them are ex-US Rangers now turned Mercenaries that work for a company named SSC (Security and Strategy Corporation). The story takes you to multiple places around the world like Iraq, South Korea, USA and even in the middle of the ocean on a Aircraft Carrier (This mission was the best so far because of the awesome scenery and action involved!). Both characters are funny in their own way because of the interactions they have with each-other between action sequences. Their remarks/comments/actions are pretty hilarious.

Since you are mercenaries, you earn money by doing your mission objectives (primary and optionals). You can then use that money to buy weapons from a large arsenal and then you can upgrade these weapons with various add-ons like larger clip size, new barrel (increased damage), silencers and even mounted shields. Talking about weapons, my only disappointment is that you cannot carry more than 3 guns (+ grenades) and you unfortunately cannot pickup your enemy’s gun, just his bullets. Weapons are classified into 3 classes: Primary, Secondary and “Special”. Primary Weapons are your basic rifles and machine guns, Secondary are pistols and SMGs and Special are sniper rifles and Rocket Launchers. With the right upgrades, the weapon’s accuracy is excellent (even when blind firing!). I think that they should have improved some of the weapon physics. When playing on the normal difficulty (you need to finish the game once to unlock hard), it isn’t normal that an enemy survives after getting shot in the head 4 times. Sometimes, a well placed shot to the chest does more damage. Explosions are a little disappointing as well. If you shoot a fuel barrel, a mine or even throw a grenade, the splash damage and animation is so small that it isn’t even worth using. It’s better to keep your grenades for to take out enemies from their heavy cover. The coop “moves” that are available in the game are pretty cool. When one of them picks up a riot shield (or creates one by removing a car door), the other can shoot from behind the cover of the shield while the holder moves. You can also use the following abilities:

Step jump: One person stands up against a wall and holds his hands out while the other person gets lifted up. The second person can then reach down and pull first person up.
Swap weapons: Players exchange their primary weapons.
Healing: When one player is injured, the other player must run over to him and either drag him to a safe area or heal him in that spot. The injured player also has a “bleed-out” bar, which limits how much time they have left before they die from their injuries. This bar decreases from 1. The difficulty played and 2. If enemies continue to shoot them.
Coop sniping: Players enter a “sniping” mode where they coordinate killing different targets at the same time.
Coop parachuting: Players go down 1 parachute. While 1 steers, the other shoots.
Back-to-Back: They also included a mode called Back-to-Back witch pretty much explains it all. In this mode, you are switched to bullet time and usually assaulted by a large number of ennemy troops. This mode is planned and cannot be activated by the player.

Since this game involves 2 players, it incorporated a notion used commonly in MMORPGs called: Aggro. The player with the “Aggro” is the one that enemies are looking/firing at. In order to determine that, EA included a basic meter showing who has the aggro. The players that has the “aggro” will flash red. Players need to use the aggro as a tactic to overcome some groups and heavily armored enemies. Players can use certain abilities involving aggro:

Overkill:the player with the most aggro goes into a fury doing X2,X3,X4 etc. shooting damage to the enemies, in this mode bullet time is initiated and the player cannot crouch, but doesn’t have to reload either. The other player without aggro becomes transparent and moves faster, they are recommended to use hand to hand combat while in this mode. Both players have 15 seconds before all aggro is drained and both players are equal.
Feign Death: If player one is about to die, he can fake his death. All the aggro will go to the second player. Then player one can get up and attack them from behind. (If walked past)

I saw of reviews of the game online and most of them were trashing the singleplayer experience of it. I must say that I don’t believe it’s fair to rate this game based on it’s singleplayer since it’s based on the cooperative experience. I can say that the other player AI is not bad but like I said, don’t play this game if you’re going to play it by yourself: you will ruin the experience! At least, you can give different commands to your ally.

I didn’t have time to try out the online multiplayer portion of the game, but it looks like it basically consists of the same kind of multiplayer experience as other shooters. Graphically, the game looks great and I can consider it on-par with other shooters released lately. It may not reach CoD4’s standards, but it’s still pretty good. I experienced very few slowdowns and the lighting in the game is really good. When you come out of a dark cave and then you are suddenly outside, the sun blinds your vision for a few seconds.

Overall, I recommend that you rent this game and play it through with a friend. You can do it through XBL (I recommend this as you will enjoy playing full screen) or via split-screen. Even though it’s kind of short, it’s worth playing through it at least once.

A special thanks to Wikipedia.com for the definitions and pictures.

Tags: Army of Two, cooperative
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This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 18th, 2008 at 2:49 pm and is filed under Previews & Impressions, Xbox 360 Previews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.