Schadenfreude

I was excited about Army of Two for the XBox 360 ever since I first heard that it was under development. What’s not to like? It has a single player campaign that’s built from the ground up with co-op play in mind, lots of weapon choices and a reasonable selection of locations.

The reality of the game is somewhat different. I’ve recently finished the game on the medium difficulty (mostly, but more on that later) and I have to admit that it wasn’t very much fun to play. First off, the characters are unlikeable sociopaths who are completely OK with the fact that they kill masses of people for profit. They don’t even have any hitman-like nobility or the moral excuses of a soldier in a position that he surely doesn’t want to be in. These guys purposely put themselves in a position where they are paid to kill people – lots of people. Yes, I know it’s only a game, but the regular fistpumping at the swath of destruction that these two cut gets old really, really fast. I don’t enjoy playing games where the protagonists are reprehensible people unless that's the whole point (Overlord and, if you play your cards right, Fable). But those games are cartoony and fun, this just made me uncomfortable.

While the characters’ personalities are unpleasant, I could have lived with that (it is just a game, after all). The game’s main flaw is that it just isn’t very much fun to play after the first couple of missions. The tactics are the same every time, no matter the mission. You see enemies, you find cover, you shoot. The enemies find cover and you wait for them to stick their heads up and you shoot them. Sometimes they will try to flank you and you shoot them. Sometime you will try to flank them, and you shoot them. Occasionally, an armored enemy comes along and you make your buddy get his attention so that you can sneak up behind him and shoot him where he isn’t armored. You repeat this process until no more enemies come out of the woodwork. Then you advance a bit till you find more enemies and the whole song and dance starts over again.

Sure the environments are different, but it’s really the same slow, tedious crap each time. By the last half of the last mission, I switched the difficulty to easy so that I could just get it over with sooner. You get the same achievements regardless of the difficulty (unless you play on the hardest setting, which you first have to unlock by beating the game on easy or medium). I just wanted to finish the game so that the pain would stop.

What’s with the bling? As you fight, you generate “aggro” which determines who the enemies pay attention to. If your partner is using a big, loud machine gun then the enemies are more likely to be shooting at him instead of you as you sneak around with your silenced pistol. OK, that makes sense and is pretty reasonable, I suppose. Different guns generate different amounts of aggro during use and different modifications that you make to the guns adjust that further. That’s fine too. The dumb part is that you can alter the appearance of your gun to generate additional aggro too. The only choice that the game gives you is a shiny, gold and silver version of the gun (sometimes that’s the only modification available for a particular weapon). I never bought those “upgrades” because I couldn’t get past how dumb it would be to have my character running around with a sparkly, Paris Hilton version of an AK-47. I don’t even mind the idea of altering aggro with the appearance of the gun, just give us some choices.

Finally, the ending sucks. Without giving too much away, by the end of the game you have two main guys to kill. After slogging through countless soldiers, you finally reach the first of these people. As you approach him, the game switches to a cutscene where your characters proceed, very anticlimactically, to kill him. OK, I thought, but at least we get to kill his boss. Nope. The cutscene continues and your characters kill him too. So after forcing you to play as a bunch of cold blooded sociopaths through this repetitive and largely uninspired game, the designers don’t even give you the satisfaction of killing the final enemies yourself.

Seriously, though, I haven’t seen an ending that irritating since I played Bugs Bunny’s Crazy Castle on the original GameBoy way back when I was a kid. After going through eighty (that’s 80, folks) levels of the most boring, tedious, repetitive crap, you simply got the words “You are good player” with an animated picture of Bugs jumpy around like a complete ass.

Having said all that, there are some good points to the game too. The sociopathic protagonists seem to be genuinely worried about each other’s safety. The weapons are varied and I really liked most of the customization options. The locations are nice visually, though some get pretty repetitive. Finally the story is OK, but you’ll figure out the plot much sooner than the characters do.

It shouldn’t come as any surprise that I’m going to sell the game. I’ve gotten as many achievements out of it as I’m going to get. I really don’t seem myself playing it any more.