To be a hired gun is a lucrative career, think about it you get to travel around the world with lots of exercise and meet interesting people. The only downside is being covered from head to toe in armor, lugging around ammo and guns. But you get to go around taking out bad guys or guys you just don’t like for MONEY. Would you still take the job? If so then welcome to the world of Salem and Rios, two men that take on the world in the PSP version of Army of Two: 40th Day, read more to get the scoop on this review!
Welcome to Shanghai, where it is a few years after your established self employment as private military contractor. Alice Murray still remains your guardian angel giving you intel and surveillance throughout your missions. You run Tran World Operations or better known as TWO.
Everything goes smoothly on routine assignments, until a rival company decides that you’re stepping on their territory and wants to take TWO out! The rival PMC (private military contractor) company starts causing mayhem in Shanghai, which throws you into a battle of survival. Not only will you have to take down enemies but it seems like the whole world is against you. Buildings start falling over, helicopters start attacking, and saving hostages is not the easiest thing anymore. I sure hope you got diapers for this chaos because its going to be SHITSTORM!
To start, you must pick your character (Salem or Rios) and then go through the tutorial, where you learn the controls. The analog controls the character, the face buttons works as aiming but with a twist. They (X, O, Square and Triangle) shoot in angles so you better learn it fast. The D-pad deals with commanding your A.I partner. Where Left and Right directions puts him into aggressive or passive mode, Up orders him to follow or hold his position and Down will change to your secondary weapon. The shoulder buttons deal with melee, actions, crouching and rolling. The L-Trigger also allows you to interact with the environment and the people. And the R-Trigger, allows you to crouch and roll.
The graphics are pretty good for the PSP and understandable on the artistic point of view. It might seem weird to see Salem and Rios more distorted with a cartoon look. However it works, with the PSP and even with the overhead view while in gameplay.
Strategy is the key factor in this game; how you use the A.I is crucial to survive in combat. Having the A.I hold position and keeping them aggressive, will have the enemies totally forget about you. This strategy comes in handy when dealing with armored boss fights.
As some of you might know Army of Two was big on upgrades and co-op. In this game, you have that weird creepy guy that pops out of nowhere, asking “Do you want to buy some weapons?” Aside from the fact of where he appears and just humor him because he’s there to help you…for a price (of course)! He allows you to buy weapons and upgrades for the current weapons you have. Most of your money is earned through missions but you do find the occasional money laying along with shields and health.
The co-op is all about team work of course and this is important for you to survive to try to have a good partnership. There are times in the game where you can split up to distract the enemies and either flank them from behind or hack certain weapons to trick your enemies. But be careful because there is friendly fire on.
Two features that I like in any video game are the “save anytime” feature and “moral choices”. Army of Two encourages you to save your game anytime you want to, which is a great feature. The moral choices is a new feature to the game and trust me they’re consequences to your choices. Depending on what you chose, it’ll effect situations/gameplay. So choose wisely.
All right here comes the ugly segment of the game. It was nice to have moral choices in the game. However, sometimes its a lose-lose situation. Even if the game acknowledges you did something right it sometimes turns out to be something bad later on. At times the A.I will forget to do something like say HEAL YOU or decides to be a spectator even when he’s in aggressive mode. That’s when I wish they kept that feature out of the PSP version, like they had in the first game.
To finalize, Army of Two: 40th Day has a good co-op, action packed gameplay, and multiplayer. The bad areas can be looked over but can bring out some anger at times, especially when you accidentally kill a hostage. I say it is a buy, fortunately the game hits stores today so take a buddy and pick up this title and enjoy the co-op. Stay frosty gamers!