Review :: Army Of Two: The 40th Day

It’s been almost exactly two years since we first witnessed the videogame bromance that was Army Of Two. It didn’t seem on the cards, but Salem and Rios have returned to bring their brand of warfare to the battlefield once again. This time the musclebound mercs are fighting their way through the streets of Shanghai and, as expected, the proverbial ‘S’ has hit the fan.

For all the good that the original Army Of Two did, there was a lot of bad in that game. If the aforementioned major bromance wasn’t enough to put you off, the mechanics only really worked when playing with a human partner and, even then, they didn’t work all the time. There was too much ‘messing about’ (technical term) to be done in the first game. All those back to back gunfights and constantly having to give one another a lift up to a high ledge became tedious after a while and made playing through parts of the game a bit of a chore. Thankfully, a lot of these needless co-op implementations have been removed. There are still some that remain, but they’re a bit more few and far between.  To put it simply, it is actually possible to play this game through on your own. Although, I have to say, it’s a lot more fun when playing alongside a mate.

The campaign mode is your typical action game premise: Something serious has gone down (spoiler: it’s those damn terrorists again) and it’s up to Salem and Rios to save the day and return Shanghai from the clutches of this evil group of extremists. Pretty run of the mill stuff really. I might be making a sweeping generalisation here, but I doubt there was anyone turning to Army Of Two for it’s story. It might not be a modern classic, but you can shoot guys in the face and blow stuff up. In the end, isn’t that what we all want?

The biggest addition to the campaign mode is a new moral choice system. This didn’t really seem necessary in a game like this, but in context it works pretty well. The problem is, these choices aren’t all that varied. They consist of choosing to save or slaughter Shanghai civilians and a larger choice at the end of each mission. The civilian choices crop up far too often and, after a while, they became more of an obstacle than anything else. The choices at the end of missions are much better. These tend to be much larger and actually have an effect on your game towards the end. Not only that, but you get to see if what you did was really for the best in a comic-book style animated cut scene.

These scenes actually did have an effect on me and I’ll admit that I felt genuine regret at some of my decisions. Aside from these, there’s regular cut scenes that flesh out the overall story and keep it moving forward. Bits of the story will often be told in game as you blast your way through the levels and there’s also the, seemingly obligatory, audio logs to pick up too. None of this really added to my experience at all. Salem & Rios aren’t exactly relatable, in fact, they’re pretty unlikeable. I’d also like mention that as much as I like Nolan North in games like Uncharted and Assassins Creed II, his presence here really did nothing other than make me think of Nathan Drake (and thus, much better games) when my character opened his mouth.

Gameplay-wise The 40th Day is, for all intents and purposes, a cover-based shooter with a bunch of co-op mechanics thrown in. I often found myself wading into a group of enemies and taking out the majority before my AI controlled partner could even get a look in. I was happy to find that the partner command system worked a lot better this time around. If nessecary, I could send my buddy to distract the bulk of the enemies whilst I crept around picking off stragglers. As I mentioned before, the co-op moves have really been trimmed down in the seqel compared to the last outing. There were hardly any of the things that made the original game become so tedious, although I could’ve done with a lot less co-op door openings and step jumps in the latter half of this one.

Graphically I thought 40th Day was pretty run of the mill. Nothing fantastic, but nothing terrible either. There were a few instances of texture pop in here and there and, on occasion, the character models and animation looked a little flawed. Other than that everything was pretty good. The environments are fairly detailed and the colour palette and lighting effects in the game’s later stages were reminiscent of The Saboteur – that was probably all the darkness, red posters and fascism.

I think EA have delivered with this game what they should have originally. However, I do see quite a bit of room for improvement. This a game that is designed for co-op and this is how I suggest you play it. For those wanting a good single player experience, I’d look elsewhere. Army Of Two: The 40th Day is a good co-op romp designed for people who just want to kick ass and chew bubble gum with a friend.

8/10

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