Joystiq impressions: Army of Two
If you've stood up to a bully and told him he was gonna get a beating, a clever response from him would be "Oh yeah? You and what army?" If you'd responded, "Um ... me and this guy," you probably would have been laughed into oblivion.
In Army of Two, that's all you get ... you and a buddy as private military contractors. The game is completely built around co-op, which the developers frequently found themselves enjoying in games like Halo and Contra (shout out, old school style!) so why not make a game that's all about co-op gameplay? Your buddy can be sitting next to you, via splitscreen, or they can be sitting in Sydney, Australia, via the online co-op. Two's company, three's a crowd.
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Granted, your buddy will be armed to the teeth and looking something like Jason from Friday the 13th on steroids, but it's still just you and him. To make it a bit more exciting than two guys just running around blowing the crud out of anything that moves, they added in the tandem aggro system.
Aggro is basically on a sliding scale from 1 to 100, and it's constantly changing during the course of each level. You gain aggro by being aggressive and killing enemies, blowing things up, and basically causing a ruckus. If you hang back and aren't as eager to rush into battle, then you lose aggro. As you gain aggro, your character starts sporting a glowing red aura, meaning the enemies will all focus on you instead of your teammate. Likewise, the non-aggro player starts to turn translucent, and eventually will be ignored by enemies unless you start whaling on them.
Gaining aggro also activates other features, like Back to Back, where both players stand back to back, and time slows down, allowing you to pick off enemies, bullet-time style. There's another feature called Overkill mode where you move super fast, but you deal out quad damage. These and other modes can be activated depending on your aggro levels.
You can also activate mini-games with your partner, like healing them if they get downed by fire. We swear to god we aren't making this up, but if your buddy takes too many rounds, you can plug the bleeding with ... tampons. Apparently this happens on the battlefield as well, but whoever thought we'd find a minigame where you have to stick tampons in bullet holes.
In addition to aggro, the game features highly customizable character models and weapons. In fact, you can customize your weapons to a ridiculous degree. Select a basic model, add a longer barrel, underslung grenade launcher, shotgun barrel on top, color it how you want it, engrave the barrels, etc. There are literally a million different weapon combinations, and in some cases you can actually outfit your gun with bling. Ridiculous, but for some reason ... cool as well.
Throughout each of the six worlds (we were in China during our tour, Iraq is also included) you'll be helping your partner over walls, dragging them to safety when they're wounded (they can keep shooting while you drag 'em), rappelling them down walls, driving them in vehicles (or manning the turrets in the same) ... basically just being a dynamic duo of death. EA Montreal estimates that the game will take around 10 to 12 hours to play through, but since it's co-op based, you'll probably play each level very differently when you hook up with a new partner.
If you're unable to find someone to play with, either online or off (sniff, sniff), then you can double up with the "Partner AI" system, which EA assures us is "the dream of the human machine" -- whatever that means.
