The Just Win Clan

Army of Two Reviewed

By Bill Tomer

Shooters are a very heavily contested section of the video game industry.  I’ve played quite a few of them.  It seems these days, if you don’t put out a shooter that is ground breaking, it’s not going to make a dent in the video game market.   Game developers have to walk a fine line of either building a shooter with amazing graphics, great A.I., or something completely innovative that gamers haven’t seen before.  If the game doesn’t amaze in one of those areas, it’s not going to make a mark in the gaming world.  Unfortunately for Electronic Arts, Army of Two straddles that line.

In AoT, the world’s armies are now run by a group of mercenaries that work for corporations and are paid to take on military missions.  You and your buddy are two of these mercenaries tasked to find bad guys and kill them.  Using team tactics, you are either Salem or Rico, fighting to earn a buck and upgrade your arsenal.  The game is intended to be a split screen co-op or online co-op third person shooter.  There is a one player mode but the game, from the name forward, was intended to be a multiplayer experience and thus, that is what I will base my review on.  There is also a online versus mode, but as you will see later, it’s probably not worth mentioning.

Graphics – 7.5

There is nothing to write home about here.  Army of Two doesn’t really stand out with any of its gameplay visuals.  However, the cut scenes of the story in AoT are gorgeous and actually had me saying “Wow” while playing.  They were worthy of some CGI movie never created.  In fact, EA might have been better served writing this story into a movie instead of a middle of the road game.  There is some good about the graphics on AoT.  The maps look good, the characters look good and the muzzle flashes are decent.  The developers threw in a little bit of character customization by allowing the user to buy new masks for the characters, which is cool for about thirty-five seconds.  The good news is that there is nothing here to complain about.  Nothing looks BAD so you won’t find me complaining about the graphics, I’m just not going to talk them up either.

You’ll find your customizations to be graphically enhancing.  You can upgrade your weapons which will cause them to look different in the game.  I’ve already mentioned buying new masks, and you can also upgrade your armor which makes your character look a bit different and also helps him sustain more damage in game.  Still, not great, but fine.

The best aspect graphically about the game is the use of “ragdoll” physics when you kill an enemy.  In far too many shooter games, when you kill an opponent by shooting him in a certain part of the body, the enemy will go into some predetermined “death drop” and fall to the ground the same way, regardless of what body part you shot to kill him.  Army of Two doesn’t have that problem.  If you shoot an enemy in the leg to kill him, his leg will fly out from under him.  If you hit him in the shoulder, his shoulder will push his upper body backwards as he falls to the ground.  It’s very cool to see and I think shooters created in the future should figure out a way to implement this same idea.

Sound – 7.0

The sound in AoT is also nothing special.  Everything is well produced, with explosions having a good boom effect and guns all having their unique sounds.  I’d have to say that the dialogue between characters is a little over the “mature” top.  Far too often the characters drop “F” and “S” bombs just for the sake of saying it.  I don’t know what EA was looking to do with its “adult” sounding game, but it really doesn’t seem to fit.  There were literally times I sat there thinking, “I don’t think he needed to say that”.  I think it could have been produced a little better.

There is one major problem with the sound in this game.  The online voice chat is extremely quiet, often making it hard to hear your teammate.  I found myself turning my TV down all the time just so I could hear the other player.  This takes away from the game tremendously because everything has to be so quiet just to be able to communicate.  EA should have put in some way to turn up the volume of the voice chatting (like Rainbow Six) so that I could have been able to enjoy the sounds in the game a little more.

Playability – 6.0

The controls on AoT are familiar and similar to other first person shooters.  It’s the controllability of this game that really ruins all gameplay.  There is something wrong here that is hard to put your finger on.  The best way I can explain it is when you’re sighting your gun and you move it in any direction, when you center the analog stick, the sight doesn’t stop moving right away.  It doesn’t matter how slow you go or how fast you move, it still moves a bit after you’re done moving the stick.  This can get VERY frustrating when trying to sight and kill enemies.  It actually gets to be pretty frustrating to try to shoot people.

The game utilizes a cover and fire system like Gears of War.  You will find yourself doing a lot of blind firing from behind cover.  In my opinion, firing blind should never be accurate because you can never see your target.  In AoT your blind fire shots seem as accurate as any other type of shot.  Because of this there is no reason to do anything else.  Every map becomes a systematic loop of find cover – shoot – move up, find cover – shoot – move up, until the map is complete.  And, with the exception of a few instances where you’re strapped to a parachute or riding in a boat, every map requires that exact strategy.  This is a bad thing.  The game gets fairly monotonous in its gameplay at a rapid rate.  Suddenly the game is over and it never achieved anything that could be perceived as a high level of difficulty.

The game’s biggest innovation is called “Aggro”.  “Aggro” is basically you or your teammate firing your gun in the direction of the enemy to focus the enemy’s attention toward that player.  There is a meter at the top of the screen that tells you which teammate is controlling the “Aggro” which basically means that the enemy is focused on that player.  This gives the other teammate the opportunity to flank the enemy and get a kill.  Yes, I said a kill, meaning only one.  As soon as the flanking teammate kills one of the enemy A.I., the “Aggro” focuses on that person meaning that if he wasn’t under cover to get that kill, he’s essentially dead.  It ends up only being effective against highly armored opponents, which basically ruins the biggest innovation of the game.

The most fun in the game happens when your and your teammate go into “back to back” mode.  One of the players will yell, “Let’s go back to back!” and you and your buddy will do just that, go back to back and take out a host of bad guys that are running at you from all directions.  However, these back to back moments are predetermined in the game and only happen in very few situations, so we can’t really up the game’s score for something that only happened a few times.  It is fun to do though.

Fun Factor – 7.0

I’m not going to lie.  At first I thought this game was pretty cool.  I was playing online with a friend and we got caught up in the two man celebrations, the ability to smack each other on the head, and the fact that we were gunning down the opposition for cash.  Once we got used to the basic principles of the game, meaning find cover – shoot – move up, we easily ran through every map on the game pretty quickly.  Like I said before, this became pretty monotonous after a while because the game required the same strategy to clear every map.  There is even a map where you and your buddy are riding a monorail to another location.  There are enemies along the way shooting RPG’s at the monorail car.  The strategy to beat this is so simple we were able to do it in the first try.  This sequence, being one of the variations in the game, should not be clearable just by standing pat and waiting for the next map of find cover – shoot – move up.  It was sad.

In this game you will have fun, for a while.  Being part of a two man team is fun, blasting through enemies, clearing objectives, getting new weapons, it’s all fun.  Then you realize you’re really not working for anything because clearing things is too easy.  That’s when the fun starts to go away and you’re waiting for the game to get a little harder.  It never does, and then it’s over.

Replay Value – 5.0

The replay value gets the game’s worst score.  Running through the maps is fairly easy and I’m not sure raising the difficulty level would be any more fun.  Also, the game is fairly short.  My friend and I beat the game in 4 days, which I would say is a maximum of 7 to 8 hours.  In my opinion, on a disc that holds as much information as a Blu Ray disc, this isn’t enough game.  Maybe you would want to up the difficulty and go through the same find cover – shoot – move up maps again, but I don’t.

Online is horrific.  I literally played online for a little over 7 minutes.  I have standards.  Finding a match is ridiculous, and in fact, there really is no finding a specific match.  You have two options, to be added to a match or to create one.  If you create one for yourself or create one so that you and a friend can play online, you have to sit there and wait for two random people to join the room.  If only one random person joins the room, you continue to sit there until the empty slot is filled.  This is as archaic as any online game I’ve ever seen.  The online play isn’t any better.  You’re playing with a teammate against two other individuals who are trying to achieve the same objectives the computer sets out for you.  There are AI opponents in the maps along with the live opponents.  However, the AI opponents are there just to shoot you.  They’re not trying to fulfill the objective.  So, instead of find cover – shoot – move up, you get a style of play like every other online shooter, except with the shoddy controls, killing the live opponents feels totally random.  It’s just not very much fun, so if you’re looking for replay value in AoT’s online area, it’s not there.

Bottom Line (an average) – 6.5

Bottom line, this game is worth renting if you have a friend that wants to play a co-op shooter with you.  It is obvious that this is what the game was intended for and it comes through with an experience that is fun at first, but in the end, not as much fun as you anticipated.  However, the game can be improved and has potential and I expect there to be an Army of Two 2.  Let’s hope that my predicted second installment comes through with more excitement.