Army of Two ain’t half bad…

If you haven’t heard already, I went out and bought Army of Two just the other week. After playing through the campaign one and a half times already, and messing around on the multiplayer for about an hour, I’m going to have to say, this game isn’t half bad.

Army of Two definitely revolves around the cooperative play. If you don’t have friends, you probably won’t like it. There are also a few small bugs in the campaign and the controls aren’t entirely perfect, so chances are if you get frustrated over small things you won’t like it either, but you probably won’t like it anyways because people who get frustrated easily don’t usually have friends to play coop games with anyways.

You can read more of my opinions on it after the jump.

This game definitely borrows heavily from Gears of War. In both of the games, you’re highly dependant on cover, and sticking to and firing from cover is usually the best way to kill a large group of enemies. When you play the campaign single player, your AI partner is usually pretty useless. He will respond well to orders that you give him; Stay under cover when you tell him to stay, move when you tell him to move, shoot when you tell him to shoot, but chances are you’ll only get him to stay in one place and shoot blindly until he’s got enough aggro that you can move forward and kill everything on your own. There are some cool things that are in this game that can make it more fun than just playing Gears of War, to name a few, base jumping with a parachute, going back-to-back to kill a large group of enemies and running and shooting behind a riot shield. Unfortunately though, as with other things in this game, it makes it difficult to enjoy it if your partner kind of sucks.

Playing the campaign cooperatively instead of with the AI partner can potentially make the game a lot more fun. You won’t be forced to order around and baby-sit a stupid computer, but if your friend is a dumb-ass chances are it will make it much worse. On the other hand, if your friend is too good of a player and the game is serious business to them, it will make the game incredibly dull for you. Your best bet is to play with someone who you can screw around with and still have fun. In my case, I played Army of Two with my brother Skuj. Being able to yell at your partner and bitch them out for stupid things is quite possibly the most fun you’ll have playing any cooperative game. Not only that, it’s very amusing to pimp out your weapons and show them off (The gold plated Stinger looks so tacky, but it’s so hilarious). It’s also pretty fun for using rocket-propelled grenades to kill men wearing heavy armor. Explosions are definitely the best way to kill big people.

All things said and done, Army of Two isn’t a perfect game. It’s definitely not as good of a shooter as Call of Duty 4, but to be perfectly honest, that’s pretty hard to beat. It’s probably not going to be as fun of a multiplayer experience as Gears of War either, but that’s also pretty tough to beat as well. What makes this game is definitely who you play it with, so you’ll probably be better off saving your money, unless the people you know who have it are really, really cool. It ain’t half bad, but it if you’ve got better already, you should stick with it.