“Can You Hear Me Now?” The Army of Two Experience
Army of Two - commonly referred to here at Lolocaust Towers as Army of Poo - is the sort of challenge we like. Not challenging on a difficulty level, just challenging like a seven year old who only eats marmite and refuses to change out of his Superman shirt.
Boidster and I - foolhardy as we are - decided to undertake the challenge of putting up with the game, long enough we hope to complete the game. So far things have been going, well… so far things have been crap.
Find out what has befell us after the jumperoo.
Things got off to a rocky start when the two of us couldn’t get into a match together, due in part to a rather complicated way of finding a simple ‘co-op campaign’ mode. Then we hit up the obligatory training level.
Now I have played through the training mission before, and it was simple enough, but right from the offset we were hit by jerky, juddery play. Now being as this is an EA title, and on hosted servers, and being as it is far from a ‘popular title’ this was surprising, but could be explained by the fact that the game is on two different sets of servers. The Army of Two servers and the Army of Two EU servers. Guess which one is woefully lacking in decency. So with jerking, freeze ups and the like it was not a good foundation for the next problem.
Now you have to understand something about Herr Boidster, he has the worst kind of luck when it comes to Xbox headsets. Basically if he were dictating this post it would end KSSSSSSPHHHH! BAAARRRRRRR…. ………. ……….. …. .. ……. . . . . …………….. …. KSHHH….. surely?
That does not help in a co-op title. Let alone a badly designed one.
Sadly, the only time it does decide to actually work, the game throws something ridiculous at us, for example I was walking through a hut and spotted a PC monitor, with a pretty screen saver. I levelled my pimped out rifle at it - more on that later - and fired eight shots at the screen. Which while looking like a standard TFT monitor, was instead crafted from indestructible materials, titaniflon perhaps? Or maybe superflextic? Either way it was farcical. Especially when some items are destructible, and others and indestructible, but with no reason to explain it. Bottles break, glass doesn’t.
Another time where Boidster’s headset saved us from a VERY angry conversation was during the second co-operative parachute jump. Well, a base jump actually, but it was frankly rubbish from start to finish. Quite how the team behind Army of Two managed to make a section of a game that has one player parachuting through a canyon network, with the second player strapped to his chest plugging rounds into the enemies ahead suck so bad is beyond me. Clearly they went to the same school of production as Max Bialystock.
Some missions are so vague that even the in-game GPS hint system has no idea what to do, instead providing you with non-contextual hints. For half an hour we attempted to stop a missile launch, which was totally vague. In fact the in-game audio suggests an evacuation, but it turns out that those messages were for the resident foes. Which is helpful.
But all through this I have negated to mention the single moment, about fifteen minutes into the game, that made (required for me to follow him up) fail to occur. Cue numerous attempts involving walking into walls, around the walls, running around, shooting the walls… it really was woeful. And not the best way to convince us that our long standing perception of games could sometimes be wrong, as Boidster found hints of with Lost: Via Domus.
We are continuing on with our challenge, but with time running out if look unlikely that we will finish the game in time. Which of course would be dreadful as we would potentially have to get it again!
Not bloody likely.
Either way, join us for more shenanigans on the next installment of The Army of Two Experience, same bat time, same bat channel.
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