When I first saw Army of Two at E3 in 2007, I was stoked. I loved the idea of having a modern day military action game with a focus on co-op play, and that it was being brought by EA almost ensured it was going to be a great experience. Outside of a few issues, Army of Two was just that, a really great co-op experience. This Fall, we’ll have a full sequel to enjoy on several platforms, including the PSP.
What we saw of the closed demo presentation was great. At the outset of the demo, the developers talked about how the first experience was set up in a firefight, co-op moment, firefight, sequence, and one of the primary goals during development this go around was to make the co-op element of the game much more fluid.
Before getting into that, I will point out a few other changes that have been made to the game. One fairly minute point that was made by the developers was that now, the two main characters (the same two from the first game) spend a fair bit of time without their masks on. This was done to help make the two characters (Salem and the other fellow who’s name I forget) more human; the developers reasoned that, with the masks always on, even though players could customize the masks, the two just seemed like ‘death machines’ rather than human, an idea that they really didn’t want to enforce.
So, as part of that, the characters not only spend a good amount of time without their masks on, but there is also a new morality system in place. This morality system doesn’t appear to attempt to be as deep as an RPG or sandbox game, but the basic jist of it is that players get rewarded for doing ‘the right thing,’ although players can take either path. An example were were shown was scene whereby our heroes were raiding a weapons closet in a security office of a building. A security guard popped into the room and a seamless in game cutscene started, where the guard was questioning what Salem and his buddy were doing. After the short cutscene, players had to choose a path — return the weapons and see what happens, or proceed to take the weapons and live with the outcome. The audience voted and the majority (although not I) voted to take the weapons. After pressing the corresponding face button, another seamless cutscene started and the security guard is accidentally killed, it was rather interesting.
The developers also stressed that they wanted to keep players constantly on the brink of action, unlike a lot of games where players begin to interact shortly after a large event (he made a great point in this). That said, players are now going to be part of major events , rather than sitting back and watching them happen in cutscenes and then working with the aftermath. In some ways, this honestly reminded me of Uncharted (and Uncharted 2 of course) in that players are actively involved in major events in the narrative, rather than learning about them through cutscenes and other methods. The example shown had both players navigating their way through an office building when suddenly the top of the building, right down to the large ceiling of the room the players were in, was ripped off and removed, exposing the night sky.
Getting back to the idea of making the co-op play more seamless, EA showed us a new mechanic in the game that allows one player to show the location of hostile targets to the other player who isn’t in a position to see said hostiles. This is done with a slick ‘vision’ system that has the player who does have the hostiles in sight virtually tag them using a computerized inteface that takes over the HUD (this looked very seamless and fast to use). When this is done, their buddy can see these tagged foes through the same kind of computerized interface that pops up in their HUD. With this ability, both buddies can attack the hostiles simultaneously for example, with the “blind” buddy having the ability to shoot through, potentially, the obstruction that is keeping them from seeing the hostiles in the first place.
Another new mechanic to the experience has players encountering hostages, being kept in place by hostiles. You can approach these hostiles with stealth (by sneaking up behind them) and if you capture their commander (identified by his appearance), the other hostiles will likely give up.
In sum, Army of Two: The 40th Day is looking great, and it should be one the many awesome games coming out this Fall vying (successfully I predict) for your gaming dollar and time). We should have a full review up this Fall so be sure to check it out.
