First impression: Army Of Two

So got my hands on Army Of Two yesterday. EA Montreal made a 3rd person tactical shooter with a big focus on co-op gameplay. At least that’s what the ads and trailers been telling us for the past months. Now its time to see if it lives up to its expectations.

Before writing this I’ve only tried the local co-op splitscreen with my roomie. And so far its been an enjoyable experience, with both some upsides and downsides. For instance, I can’t understand why you change controls just to be “original”. Anyone who played Gear Of War knows that A button is for taking cover, jumping over obstacles or rolling. But in Army Of Two they went their own way and set this button to Y, with no option to change the button settings.. That’s pretty awesome right!?

Well you learn to live with the controls which actually are really solid overall. It feels right when you run, duck, slide to cover, blind fire and so on and so forth. One thing I miss though is a melee attack button. Now you melee attack by automation when you are close enough to an enemy and press the regular fire button. This can be quite frustrating since you have to stop aiming and press the shooting button again when an enemy gets to close. And if you miss, the enemy won’t be standing there waiting for you to bash his head in, he will slap you like a little bitch.

On to the game itself. The first mission is a training slash tutorial stage were you get to learn all the moves and tactics you will be using later on in the game. No one dies here, you are shooting with plastic bullets. They still hurt though
When completing the training mission you instantly get thrown into the action. The mission starts with you and your partner parachuting into a warzone. One controlling the parachute and the other one using his sniper rifle to take out as much hostiles as possible before hitting the ground. When on the ground the two marines steps up back to back to sweep of the last bad guys still standing. This is sadly something you can’t do by yourself but the back to back move it triggered automatically when you enter certain areas. Anyways, in this stance you enter something like bullet time with the standard slowmotion shooting at stupid bad guys running straight at you. Quite cool, but nothing I would miss if it wasn’t there.
There is quite alot of places were you need to use the different co-op abilities. But sometimes they feel a little strained. For example when both dudes need to go up to a door and press A to open it. Or the endless gun turrets you need to aggro stealth kill. Its good and all but sometimes you just want to shoot guys and don’t think about how to do it.

In and between missions you get to spend your hard earned cash in the weapons and upgrade shop. And its quite deep, you can get bigger barrels for more damage, bigger clips to hold more ammunition and alot more upgrades. The final thing you can do to your weapons is to pimp them, cover the guns in gold and diamonds, quite expensive but adds a bit of aggro to your weapon. Guess poor terrorists don’t like to get a shiny m16 in their face before they die..

All in all the game is cool. I especially like the way the characters look and feel. The deep upgrade and kit system, good co-op stuff to do and almost unlimited amount of bad guys to dispose of makes this game a good solid shooter that you should consider getting if you like games like Gears Of War and the likes of that.