Ah, agro, this is the system the combat seems to be built around. It’s not new; it’s been used in MMORPGs such as World of Warcraft for years.
Basically it allows one of you to draw most of the attention of the enemy while your buddy can sneak around and do the killing. You get agro by shooting at people (duh!) and by buying and upgrading bigger and better weapons. You can even pimp them out with gold plating and diamond studs. I would love to say agro is extremely original in a shooter but it isn’t really. Players have been using this strategy for years in co-op shooters; it’s just never been made this obvious before.
Here, it is an actual game feature with not one, but two visual effects to clue you in on who has the agro and who doesn’t. If you hold agro for long enough you can enter something called “overkill” mode for a few seconds. This causes the agro guy to basically turn into the Terminator. You enter a bullet time, stand up straight, and shoot with unlimited ammo. The other player turns completely invisible and can move around and do all the killing they want. In truth, overkill is only really useful for the guy who turns invisible as enemies are usually hiding behind cover making it impossible for terminator guy to achieve much.
Enemy AI will occasionally flank you and their aim is incredible from afar, but most of the time they just move to and hide behind different cover or sometimes even run in circles around cover (no, I’m not kidding). The AI is clearly still a bit buggy -- the game isn’t easy though. Oh no, it definitely is challenging and you will go down often. Luckily when one of you does go down, your partner can drag you to safety – while you supply cover fire of course – and then patch you up. It’s a cool feature that keeps the action at a fairly steady pace while still making you and your partner work together.
There are a lot of nice little co-op moves such as co-op sniping, using a riot shield together, stepping your partner up to high places, him pulling you up in return and back-to-back shooting. My favourite is parachuting; as one player guides the parachute, the other has to snipe while you float in the air tied to each other. They are nice touches but most aren’t in your control. Back-to-Back only happens at set points in the game, you can only step up where it tells you.
In fact there is a lot of hand holding in this game. Whenever there is an armoured enemy that you can only shoot in the back, the game usually tells you. There are health bars above every enemy, which definitely hurts the atmosphere. There’s also a GPS system that tells you exactly where to go and where you can do certain things. It looks cool and is very handy but doesn’t promote exploration, which is a shame because there are usually multiple ways around the environments for flanking purposes.
Speaking of environments, most of them look good even though they are missing soul. There is a serious lack of destructibility. When I shoot at a laptop, I expect it to break not just make a spark sound. For such an action-heavy game they should have had things breaking and blowing up more.
The graphics are very good though. Some of the enemy models lack detail but beyond that, this is a great looking and smooth running game that is definitely fun to play with a friend either via split screen or over Xbox Live. Multiplayer however, is a different story.
Versus game play is a two-versus-two match where both teams have to race through a map to accomplish objectives and make cold hard cash. Whoever has the most money at the end wins. That, at least, is the theory. I never got to actually find out considering every game I played in, except for one, dropped out after about two minutes.
This didn’t really matter though, as the amount of lag there was made them pretty much unplayable anyway. This is unacceptable considering the maximum players in any game is four plus AI! How can there be lag with only four players? This is 2008, so I have to wonder what is up with that? This is really a big disappointment because the concept of the multiplayer seems really fresh and original. I was truly looking forward to it.
Plus I am getting really sick of games lowering their graphics quality for multiplayer. Gears of War, which is still one of the best looking games around has been out for over two years and its multiplayer always looked just as good as its single player. Simply put, developers need to learn their game engines and online servers better and keep the quality throughout.
Bottom line, if you have friends to play with, Army of Two is a short but really fun game, which I can recommend. No point, however, if you don’t have anyone to play with, as it was basically built to be that way.
EA has already announced new downloadable content coming soon, which can only be a good thing as more levels means more co-op fun! Unless EA’s online servers get sorted out, versus multiplayer unfortunately is a total miss for now.
If multiplayer hadn’t been a broken mess the game probably would have scored higher and while good fun, Army of Two fails to be a great game. As said earlier, developers need to step it up. The 90’s are over, Next Gen is now Current Gen and to quote from Wayne’s World, we need to “live in the now.”
