Army of Two (PS3)
He ain't heavy. He's my well-armed, skull-mask-wearing brother.
3/11/2008 12:00 AM | 0 Comments | Page 2 of 2
What's Hot: One of the first games designed from the ground up to be a cooperative experience from start to finish; Bubbly in tone relative to grim combat sims like Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter
What's Not: Artificial intelligence = not terribly intelligent; Gameplay devolves into OK-you-distract-them-and-I'll-sneak-around-behind redundancy; Generating aggro is a thankless, but necessary task
Scott Jones
Status: Coffee makes me feel 4-percent sexier.
"But I did Aggro last time. Over."
"No, I did the Aggro last time. Why do I always have to do the Aggro? Over."
"Shut your candy-eater, get into cover, and do your Aggro like a good boy, will you? Over."
At this point a "Three Stooges"-style slap-fest typically broke out between my partner and I. (Note: The controls include a button that allows you to smack one another around.)
Despite all the positive things the game does -- the whirling, back-to-back shootouts, for example, do a better job of paying homage to John Woo's movies than all seven hours of
Stranglehold did -- the near-unforgiveable flaw at the heart of the
Army of Two experience can be summed up in six words.
Generating Aggro is not much fun.
A less damning flaw is the fact that the game can't seem to decide on an overall tone. You simply can't have Salem and Rios play air guitars in celebration one minute -- yes, they will in fact play air guitars at some point during the game's 10-hour-long campaign, trust me -- and then expect me to feel any tension or drama as I creep through an enemy-infested aircraft carrier the next minute.
Also: The word "bro" shall henceforth be stricken from all videogame writers' vocabularies. So it is written, so it shall be.
Despite the fluctuating tone, I still found myself preferring
Army of Two's lighter, more cartoonish attitude towards war. No, I don't need any more games to tell me how much war sucks.
In the end, despite the game's obvious overall polish, despite the imaginative efforts made to build a genuinely cooperative experience, the game still winds up feeling like an experiment more than a
bona fide game.
Army of Two features some sound ideas; they simply need to be executed with more conviction, and they need to be part of a larger, more unifying vision. As it stands,
Army of Two feels like an early sketch of a new species of game, a new kind of gameplay, and possibly even a previously nonexistent genre.
Army of Two 2, perhaps?
This review is based on a retail copy of the game provided by the publisher.
