I spent the last week playing Army of Two. It is a pretty short game. I played the full campaign mode, which is only 6 missions, in about 5 or 6 hours on the normal difficulty. The main story of the game takes you from training to be an Army Ranger to being a paid mercenary. Even though it was pretty short the main story line is a lot of fun. The game is designed to be played with a partner in co-op mode, but the times I was playing I had trouble connecting with other co-op players so I played through the game using the AI as my teammate. The game gives you a nice set of options for controlling how your teammate acts. By the end of the first mission I was getting pretty good at using my teammate to draw fire or sneak around behind while I distract the enemies. The game would have been more fun playing it with another person, but I still had fun playing it alone. The co-op related things they built into the game work pretty well. When you get shot to much you go down to the ground and your partner has to drag you to cover and heal you while you provide them with covering fire. Also, you can co-op snipe and boost each other up to higher levels as a human step ladder.

The cover system is pretty nice. If you crouch behind cover you automatically use it and lean out when you shoot without having to hit any buttons to enter/exit cover. The controls were well tuned and the options to dive and roll into cover help keep you from getting shot quite a bit. Also, the range of weapons and upgrades for them was pretty nice as well. Once I found a gun I liked I could upgrade it to make it more accurate and do more damage.

As you progress through the game you make money for completing objective that you use to buy these new weapons and upgrade your existing ones. The developers clearly expect you to play through the campaign multiple times because you don’t get nearly enough money to buy all the weapons and armor with one play through. Also, you can’t play the hardest difficulty of the game without playing through it once on normal. Personally, I found this really annoying. I don’t want to have to play through the game more than once to get all the cool weapons and armor. Plus, if I want to play of the hardest difficulty the first time through why shouldn’t I be able it. To make it worse you can’t skip any of the cut scenes. Even it you’ve alreayd played through that level once you still have to sit through the entire cut scene which could be up to 5 minutes in some cases.

While the actual game play was pretty fun there were some really annoying aspects. The load times were ridiculously long. At the start of each mission you’re waiting a minute for it to load. Then, any time you go to buy new weapon that menu system takes a minute to load up. Once you’re in the weapon’s menu each of the sub-categories takes another 30 or 40 seconds to load up. It was pretty frustrating to have to wait to load up the weapons purchasing menu and then wait again once you pick the category of weapon. It is not a one time thing either. Once you’re in the weapons menu each sub-category you go into takes time to load. Even if you were just in that sub-menu and switched to another one.

My other big complaint about Army of Two is that there is a lot of swearing in it. A lot of M rated shooters have some swearing as part of the dialog, but Army of Two has more than any other game I can remember playing. Not only is there some swearing being done by the main characters, but the enemies throughout the campaign swear a lot. Not just as part of the main story line of the game, but even the endless henchmen who are through the levels will swear like a drunken sailor. I ended up turning the volume really low and turning on subtitles because it was so bad. It would have been nice to be to turn off at least the swearing being done by the enemy AI.

I did not play a lot of the multiplayer because it took over 5 minutes to find a match. I chose for it to find me a quick match so it would put me in any game with an open spot. After 5 minutes it found me one. I can’t imagine how long it would have taken if I had tried to pick a specific game type. A played a few games of multiplayer and each time it took 4 or 5 minutes to find a game. Once I finally got into a game the multiplayer was pretty fun. It is 2v2 multiplayer where you and a partner try to get the objectives on the map before the other team can. To make things interesting there are also a lot of AI controlled enemies on the map that shoot at both your team and the enemy team. You can kill the enemy team – forcing them to respawn and giving you a little time to get the next objective while they are dead, but if you only get one of the enemy teammates the other can run over and revive them. So, the multiplayer requires good team work to play effectively.

You can get about half of the achievements playing through the game once on the normal difficulty setting but the rest are going to take at least a few games of multiplayer and a complete second play through on the hardest difficulty.

For anyone looking for a shooter to rent for a week or two I’d recommend Army of Two. The game is too short to be worth buying, but it was fun to play and then return once I finished it.