Army of Two

Other than perhaps GoldenEye on the Nintendo 64, I've never been a big fan of console shooters. With few exceptions, I find myself wishing that I had a keyboard and mouse in just about every situation. I've recently come to understand that when the game goes third person, I don't hate the gamepad quite as much. Although as I can be attested to in my recent Uncharted review, it can still be enough to ruin a game for me.

Despite all of that, I recently picked up Army of Two for my PS3. While normally I wouldn't even considering purchasing such a game, my wife was out for the evening, my cousin's wife was watching my daughter, and my cousin wanted to play something with me. Since we were craving something we could do from the couch and the game was only $20 new, I decided to give it a try. I must admit that I was pleasantly surprised.

In Army of Two, you and a friend play as two mercenaries working for a privatized military group. Salem and Rios are forced to work together doing things like helping each other up ledges or taking turns holding a shield/shooting. The story is pretty standard fare: the guy who starts out good but is obviously evil turns out to actually be evil. The game plays in third person (as you probably guessed) and is top/bottom split screen.

Loved

• Co-op play. Army of Two is completely saved by its co-op play. Playing with a friend is an absolute blast. The game does a great job of making you work together, such as one person drawing fire so the other person can sneak around and shoot people in the back. The game is also very well balanced for two people. While there is a single player mode (I suppose your partner would be AI controlled?), I can't imagine wasting any time on it. Seems like it just wouldn't be fun at all.
  
  
• Gun upgrades. The game features a money/upgrade system where you get cash for completing primary and secondary objectives that you can use to purchase both new guns and upgrades for those guns. Most upgrades are practical things: clip increases, damage upgrades, accuracy boosts, and so forth. However, each gun also has the absolutely ludicrous "bling" upgrade. It does exactly what you (and Fitty) would expect it to: it covers your weapon with gold and diamonds. While the option is undoubtedly ridiculous, I found it to be very fitting with the overall tone of the game and was a fun thing to do with all of my favorite guns.
  

Hated

• It's a console shooter. At the end of the day, this still annoys me. While I specifically purchased this game to play with my cousin while sitting on the couch, if it had been a PC game with us either playing in the same room or chatting via Skype, it would have been a better game. That's really all there is to it. The mouse/keyboard control scheme is better for shooters than a gamepad and nobody will ever convince me otherwise.
  
  
• Cliche and predictable story. I could see the entire story from the very beginning of the game. In fact, the plot twists were so unbelievably obvious, I thought that they couldn't possibly be true. No writer would be that obvious would he? Well, he was. The game was oozing with "bro-ness" and the story itself wasn't interesting in the slightest. The story did little more than provide a reason for doing what you were doing. (To its credit, it made more sense than the story of Modern Warfare 2. I suppose that's something.)
  
  
• No same machine versus mode. Unless I wasn't understanding the menu system properly, I couldn't play versus mode with my cousin. It appeared I could only play versus against people on line and then only in groups of 4. It seemed quite ridiculous to me that after playing through the campaign with my buddy, I couldn't then play against him.
  
  

This game is what I would call a "popcorn movie" game. It's not deep, it's not special, but at the end you find yourself thoroughly entertained. I would never recommend it to somebody who only intended to play it single player or even in online versus, but for $20, you and a buddy will find an entertaining afternoon/evening here.