Hands on with Army of Two

So I posted an article a while back asking if Army of Two had been delayed because it was fundamentally broken... 

Well as luck would have it I managed to wangle a quick hands on session with a pre-build of Army of Two at EA Games South African offices… First things first.. EA Games have probably the coolest bachelor pad in the world…

Anyway to the game. I expected that they would put the game in and quickly go through all the cool parts and then shove me out the side entrance… How wrong I was.

When I arrived there I was shown into the gaming room and given a Xbox 360 controller. The disc was put in and all that I was told was to watch the intro, do the training and go for it..

So there I sat all by my lonesome with complete Carte Blanche to play the game.

First Impression
This game is about fun, it doesn’t take itself to seriously and the humour is dark and rough. Some people have complained about it being immature but again I thought it fitted in with the game perfectly. Being able to smack each other around is just entertaining, if not utterly pointless.

The graphics are good but you can see that it isn’t completely polished yet, I have never been overly fussed about the graphics though. It looks cool and that is good enough for me.

Training
I started in the training module where it guides you nicely through the meaning of Aggro and how to use it to your advantage. It really does work well and is a fantastic idea. Basically you send your sidekick into the open to get blown apart and while they are all aiming at him you can sneak around and take the enemy out from behind. However if you start shooting to early the attention very quickly becomes focused on you.  Which is not a good thing.

The co-op snipe thing is still a mystery to me though,  never quite got the hang of that. Basically it goes into a zoom mode where both of you are sniping at the same time… I am sure there is a point to this but I didn’t get it.

The Tampon stuffing…. You have all heard that you heal your team mates by stuffing tampons into them. This does exist and it’s more a mini-game where you need to push the right buttons at the right time. Honestly unless they do something else here I would prefer it if they removed this, it breaks the rhythm of the game.

Level 1
You are dropped into Mogadishu to go and kill some arb warlord, someone else was meant to be doing it but he just orders you around instead. I had it on the easiest level to try and get as much of the game completed in the short time I had so the enemy AI was not great. It wasn’t bad though. I had enemies flanking me and hiding behind cars and pillars.

You can hide behind cover and ‘blind’ fire at people. You don’t really blind fire as the reticule does appear it just doesn’t work as well.. All in all this was a nice feature and well done. You hold the left trigger for proper aiming as is the norm now and that works well…

Pushing Y near cover will get your guy to slide (theatrically) into cover, which is awesome to do just to watch the animations.

The part I thoroughly enjoyed was where you had to work as a team to get out of holes (Push A to boost and then A again to pull your mate out), also at certain stages while being boosted you need to take out the enemy from the platforms above…

I managed to play until the end of the first level where you had to kill the Warlord (with his Golden AK-47) and I have to say that it was a great experience.

Conclusion
This game looks awesome, a welcome change to the typical T/FPS games out there while still keeping the solid T/FPS game play. I have to agree with EA and say that the game is not finished, hopefully the small issues like graphics and sometimes the lack of reaction to button pushes will be resolved in time.

Having said that if this game was released now I would drop R500 on it. Easily better than the majority of shooters which are released. It’s hard to compare though since it is so different… Would I give up my copy of Call of Duty 4 for it? No…. But I will happily give you Medal of Honor: Airborne AND Call of Juarez plus pay in some extra cash….

For now I expect this game to be getting a 8-9/10 from most reviewers… Solid title. Expect to see this title hitting our shelves in February 2008

Oh and a quick thanks to Chris and Ralph from EA Games for giving me this opportunity… It is much appreciated….

Last Updated: December 13, 2007