Army of Two is a third-person shooter that takes the concept of co-op play to
an entirely new level. You take on the role of one half of a two-man team of
mercenaries while a friend (or your friendly Xbox 360) takes on the other –
there is no going it alone in this game. The game’s nature of duality extends
beyond the side-by-side nature of its combat, though, because it seems that
every cool idea and feature in the game is balanced by another that doesn’t work
so well. The result is a game that will probably appeal to about half of the
shooter fans out there.
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The two in the Army of Two are Salem and Rios, two former Special Forces
soldiers who have decided to leave the army and join a private security firm.
This career change is driven by their belief that private security companies are
better equipped and more competent than the US Army. The irony inherent in all
of this seems lost on the game’s story writers in the wake of the monumental
screw-ups by private security firms such as Blackwater, but we’ll just roll with
it and accept that companies that give their mercenaries scary hockey masks are
better equipped than the most advanced military in the world.
Central to Army of Two’s combat is the concept of aggro. If you’ve played
MMORPGs before than this concept will already be familiar to you. Basically the
player that presents the greatest threat or is doing the most damage gets the
most attention from the computer –controlled enemies. In Army of Two, an aggro
meter is prominently displayed at the top of the screen with an icon
representing Salem and Rios at each end. As one player fires at the enemy the
needle moves towards that player’s end of the meter. When it reaches one end,
the other player is effectively rendered invisible to the enemy. It’s a pretty
cool mechanism that is an effective way to model suppress and flank tactics.
While one player pins down the enemy and draws their attention by emptying clip
after clip in their direction, the other is free to work his way behind the
enemy and make a quick kill shot.
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