Written by Citizen Alpha Wednesday, 03 March 2010 00:40

This weekend a friend and I got together for some good old fashioned cooperative gaming.  Pounding on his door I woke dragged him out of bed at 7 PM and went out to pick up provisions at the grocery store.  He was still a bit drunk off box wine and pretty adamant about how great it is however I picked up nice 12 pack of Red Stripe and hit the local video store to see what game we could grab.  The decision was pretty quick when we spotted Army of Two: The 40^th Day.

To add a little bit of strange to the evening on the way out I could help but noticed the absurdly worded special in place.  I checked my bag to ensure there was in fact no kids lurking with my purchase.  Firing the game up at home we both had a hazy recollection of playing the demo a few months back.  The game play of Army of Two does a great job of realizing how an over the shoulder shooter should operate and tosses in a few cooperative enhancing elements that give the overall a nice spin.  As a bit of a disclaimer my partner and I got quite sloshed so a lot of these cooperative elements like co-op sniping, hostage rescue, and human shield got quite botched pretty much every time.

You’ve got a standard armament of weapons, a primary which is typically a machine gun, a secondary which is for your side arm, a “special” slot for some sort of unique weapon like a sniper rifle, and grenades.  You can customize and upgrade these weapons at any time with cash you pick up around levels.  One of the big improvements from the last game was the fact that any time one player picked cash both players received it.  This avoided a lot of crotch punching down the line when I needed X amount of dollars to bump my gear and my partner grabbed it.

The coolest part of this game has got to be the “agro-meter” which bobs between you and your partner.  It works a lot like MMORPG’s where the guy letting loose the most rounds, firing the hardest hitting gun, or killing the most guys will get the most attention from the enemies.  When one guys pulling all the aggro, the other can pull some nice flanking maneuvers or move into a better position.  The AI is pleasantly not retarded and will outflank and use their heads as well.

Periodically you reach a point in the game where a cut scene begins and you choose between a good a bad outcome.  We opted to go full on bad guy and proceeded to execute our tutorial guide, kill helpless security guards, execute hostages, and convince some kid to run out under fire to snag us a sweet gun.  He didn’t make it.  The only good route we went was when my partner drunkly opted to go the good route and spare some tiger at a zoo we were pondering executing.

I know it sounds like a stupid scenario, but a good way through a 12 pack it all kind of made sense.  It did get a little weird when the tiger went out and actually did “good” too.  We knew each time we did a “bad” thing it had some sort of consequence and it’d play a little sad scene of a murdered kid or dead guard but this tiger actually escaped its cage and killed a guy robbing a store.  Seriously?  The scene stopped there but there was no doubt in my mind that tiger went off to cure AIDs, win the noble peace prize, and be elected Pope. All hail tiger Pope.

The game was a good time but one of its neat elements was marred with a major annoyance.  The game had some pretty outstanding boss fights, you’d approach a location and it’d pop into some cut scene of a big bad boss guy blowing up cars or walking in slow motion.  Everyone’s more bad ass in slow motion evidently.  While neat to see the first time, you couldn’t skip it.  No amount of button mashing or swearing made it go any faster.  Typically we’d use this time to drink but later down the line we found this to be a bit counterproductive.  Brawling with these guys would often take a handful of tries and plopping in a few minute speed bump between attempts was positively aggravating.  Our game ended up being cut short on a boss fight.

We were both pretty heavily intoxicated, so our aim was off and teamwork was at an all time low.  We bumped into one of these bosses and after a few attempts my partner curled up and passed out during the cut scene.  Ending on such a low note left me with a bad taste for an overall good time.  I even debated writing a considerably more scathing assessment of the game thanks to this but I can’t really deny I had a ton of fun playing.  Word on the feed is that there's even some DLC on the way. 

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