Army of Two (360)

For me, Army of Two was a pretty thought provoking experience.

And no, I am not referring to Army of Two's supposed message or commentary on the state of the modern US military. Honestly, I could care less about what the devs have to say on that issue. As far as I am concerned, the whole privitization of the military angle was just a plot device to explain why the characters were running around in kick ass skull masks and body armor featuring flame paint jobs. Good enough for me!

At any rate, when first announced, the concept sounded interesting enough, but it was the art that really got my attention. The environments looked great, and I have already mentioned how the cool, scary looking characters caught my eye.

Over time however, more info was released and my interest began to wane. As mentioned in my Jericho commentary, my opinion of AI controlled teammates is pretty low. When the first trailer was released featuring character to character dialog, I did not like the wisecracky one liners. The game continued to slide towards the bottom of my "want list" after its release as reviewers made constant mention of all of the "knuckling up" and other silliness going on. From my perspective, Army of Two went from looking like a totally bad ass looking game with lots of attitude into some sort of joke.

However, after tearing through Dark Sector, quickly followed by a full 1000/1000 on Viking, I needed something to play. While I really enjoyed the first Condemned, I was not really compelled to play its sequel. There were a handful of budget titles I had some interest in, but I figured I would hold on purchasing those until some other day. So I took a chance on Army of Two. And boy am I glad I did...

...but not because it is some Earth shatteringly great game. In fact, the reason I am so glad I bought it is because it is widely considered just "good."

The game play is solid and features good shooting, a nice weapon upgrade shop, a competent cover system, some fun actions to perform, a simple AI command menu, and the aggro system which allows you to have your teammate to draw fire while you circle around the enemy for the kill.

The story is serviceable. It does its job as it serves as a suitable vehicle for moving the action from place to place and motivating the characters. The dialog is fairly convincing as well, which was a welcomed change, especially since just about every character utters at least half a dozen cusses. (Now, I am not anti profanity or anything, I just believe that in general, swearing in games is done very poorly as it comes off sounding very forced and unconvincing, and therefore, entirely unnecessary.) The wisecracks were few and far between, and were believable. The whole "knuckling up" thing was totally blown out of proportion by the media as it was entirely player controlled as far as I could tell.

Also, perhaps I have been back in coin op for too long now, but in my opinion, AO2 is beautiful. (SURPRISE. It is powered by Unreal3.) There is a level of fidelity and detail in the textures that I have not seen too frequently in other titles. The developers were not afriad to let their HDR tone mapping system do its thing either; there is a lot of dynamic adjustment of exposure and it looks very convincing. All in all, great execution on the visual front.

This is where my AO2 experience started to become interesting. As I ended up being pleasantly surprised by the game and truly enjoyed it, I began to speak with friends who had played it. I checked out the various forums dedicated to the game. I read its reviews. On the whole, people just did not seem all that impressed with AO2 as I was.

So here's a game with all of the bells and whistles: innovative game play features, awesome graphics, cool characters, and the marketing muscle of the biggest publisher in the world... and in the end, the general perception of it is "meh."

It really got me to thinking: If AO2, which appears to have just about all of the pieces, can't put the puzzle togther, what does it take to make a truly great game that is successful on a AAA scale? What hope does anyone slaving away on a team of a hundred and twenty plus people for three or four years really have of achieving a measureable amount of success and substantial profit? I'm just not seeing it.

I enjoyed playing through AO2; it is a really good game and I recommend people try and perhaps even buy it outright. But for me, the bigger value was in the validation of my decision to go back to coin op for a while.

Score: +2