Mercenaries Killing for Cash Payments.

The “cover” system is nothing new to the First or Third Person shooter. Especially whilst playing online in cooperative modes – it just seems natural that the best way to tackle a larger enemy is to have one guy draw fire while the the teammate shoots them in the back. In Rainbow 6 Vegas, you could position your CPU controlled teammates ahead of you to take out the difficult bad guys while you snuck around to the back door and entered – guns blazing. In Gears of War, teamwork of this sort was almost the only way to take out machine gun emplacements and to defeat General Raam.
In Halo 3, while playing in Legendary metagames, teamwork was absolutely necessary to draw fire from snipers while the teammate got a clear shot with a particle beam canon.

In all of these other games, CoOp play was fully realized and was tremendously fun. The games felt fluid and all the enemies had a 50/50 chance of defeating you if you didn’t work with your partner. Unfortunately, in some more recent, lackluster games, CoOp has been done wrong – or at least, not as good as it should have been done. I played Conflict: Denied Opts and was sorely disappointed. I played Kane and Lynch which was just a little better than Conflict and now I play this overhyped newcomer which not only doesn’t get the teamwork system right, but, awkwardly makes political statements about the controversy that is Iraq.

STORY

In ”Army of Two” you take on the role of either Elliot Salem or Tyson Rios. During the beginning of the game, they begin as US Army Rangers in the 75th Regiment, assigned to work with Phillip Clyde of Security and Strategy Corporation (SSC) to assassinate Abdullahi Mo'Alim. After they succeed, they are then offered positions as “private military contractors” (read: mercenaries). At this point, they must work together to battle the “terrorists” in China, Afghanistan, Miami and of course…Iraq.

GAMEPLAY

A lot of the CoOp play elements of Army of Two have been seen before in Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell. There is the “step jump” where one player helps the next over a wall and the lifted player then pulls up player 1.
There is the “back to back” where both players back up to each other to cover their unarmored rear as if they were in some convoluted John Woo film.
“Weapon Swap” allows players to swap weapons - similar to Halo and there are “Kudos” which allow both players to congratulate each other by playing “air guitar” or even taunting one another”.

AoT’s new feature to the genre is referred to as the “Aggro system”. On screen, there is a meter, the aggro meter, which dictates the most aggressive teammate. The teammate who is shooting the most or causing the most destruction will be the most prioritized target of the game’s A.I. which means that all enemies will go after that member leaving the other member free to sneak up behind the antagonists.
Another Aggro feature is “feigning death” which allows all aggro to be given to the standing member so that the member playing dead becomes virtually invisible – free to shoot everyone in the backs.

Aggro has the potential to be an intelligent addition to the genre, but the problem is, real flesh&blood humans would never be so stupid as to take their concentration off of any target that is still moving about. This type of system, just like in Gears of War, is already in play whenever teams do battle with other teams online. It just isn’t as pronounced. In fact, once you have gained all the aggro, you’re teammate is virtually invisible and he can move about the battlefield unmolested. Its as if he’s a ghost !

The last major gameplay requirements are team healing – one teamate heals a downed teammate and “riot shield” where one member picks up a car door or a ballistic shield and both members can use it for cover while one shoots around it. Just for reference, most full metal jacket rounds blow clean through car doors in reality. There are also some glitches in the A.I. when its using the team heal feature. The AI will drag you to a safe spot before healing you, but, a glitch may occur where the teammate drags you to a ridiculously distant spot before applying the healing.



WEAPONS

The main focus of this game is to draw attention with one teammate while the other blows everyone away. This would not be possible however without really powerful weapons, and fortunately, AoT features a long weapons list and allows you to customize just about every weapon in the game.
Killing enemies earns you cash to spend on any of the various customizations similar to games like Counter Strike.

There are plenty of assault rifles such as the AK-47, H&K G36, M14, etc and there are also plenty of submachine guns such as the MP5, P90 and FAMAS. There are also shotguns such as the Rainbow 6 favorite: SPAS, RPG launchers and sniper rifle icons such as the Barrett.
The list of weapons and customizations is nearly as deep as Call of Duty 4

You can change stocks, add a grenade launcher, add a silencer, or even add larger clips.

Strangely enough, the game refers to customization as pimping your gun and even more strangely, the more pimped your gun is, the more attention enemies will pay you when you fire it - raising your Aggro meter faster. For a couple thousand dollars, you can add chrome plating or even gold !?! rims and car sold separately.

If the weapon customizations aren’t enough, your characters happen to be wearing some frightful ‘goalie’ masks - as if they are Jason Vorhees reincarnated. They can switch their masks for many others to give them that obvious, “imminent threat” appearance that no real soldier would want to have on a battlefield.


SO WHAT’S WRONG WITH IT?

From much of what I’ve said, you’d probably think AoT was a great game and rush out and buy it. True: its not a very bad game but it does have some design flaws that should have been removed at the design stage.

Firstly, many enemies take so many shots to bring them down, they seem as if they just went shopping at a SWAT Armory’s going out of business sale. What makes this even worse is that your enemies have power meters floating above their heads. This hurts the immersion level in so many ways its troubling. Whatever happened to showing damage by staining the character with blood and bullet holes?


Aiming isn’t very easy while you are moving, as bullets seem to lack both accuracy and stopping power unless you bother to stop moving, and take a precision headshot by holding the left trigger on the gamepad. This was probably done to force you to rely on your CoOp system rather than taking on every enemy with rushes. I felt this was foolish because “bullets are bullets” and should always have realistic accuracy and damage just as they did in Gears of War. In order to force you to use team tactics, “Gears” just made you take damage faster to prevent you from running every Locust member down.

The Singleplayer campaign isn’t very long either and will take some players just 5 – 7 hours to beat it in 1 or 2 sittings. This game’s major draw however, is its multiplayer which pits 2 against 2 in a mixture of deathmatch, bomb/defuse and hostage rescue. These gameplay modes are summed up as Warzone, Extraction and Bounties

Bounties is an objective based game which might include capturing command points. Warzone is an “attack & defend” type system where goals change randomly. You might be asked to protect a chopper from the opposing team or assassinating a VIP. Extraction is basically “hostage rescue” where you must get civilians to a safe location on the map. Regardless the gameplay mode, the point of each match is basically to get more money than the opposing team from performing well.

There are just 4 maps in all which for a game of this nature isn’t that great, and each map contains intelligence items which will net you extra $ if you can find them.



BOTTOM LINE

AoT Looks and sounds good. The characters and enemies are well modeled and the background environments take full advantage of the console’s hardware for draw distance and anti-aliasing.
What disappoints me however is that even with a loud 5.1 sound system, the gunshots aren’t loud enough - in fact, the dialogues drown them out…why?


My major problem however is that this game seems like it was designed by racists who see every Arab as either a civilian or a terrorist. There are suicide bombers who run at you shouting in Arabic - which is far from the reality of a realistic suicide bombing. Its as if “Army of Two” has taken a page from the real life hiring of private mercenaries (er…I mean military contractors) who feel as if they are exempt from the rules of war and can rape and slaughter Iraqi’s at will. I’m looking at you Blackwater !.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Y9DeuAnTF0&feature=related

So long as games are being made which focus on terrorism in the Middle East, the subject will be treated without an even hand and from an American-Christian centric view. The Iraq war is a delicate matter and not only does this game not take it seriously, but, it doesn’t even bother to iron out it’s kinks before satirizing its treatment of Muslim people.