Army of Two

The Middle Ages: serfs and knights, kings and barons, hovels and castles. Trebuchets and portcullises, battering rams. Boiling hot pitch and men swinging on chandeliers with swords. The plague. Really, really bad medicine.

There were so many ways you could die horribly in the Middle Ages that people started strolling around in huge suits of armour. Or riding horses clad in more protective metal than the average sports car nowadays.

You've got to love the way the human race really enjoys shortening its own lifespan. As a race, we completely embody that scene from Indiana Jones where the guy twirls his sword for ages and Indy just shoots him.

When someone comes along and says, "Haha! I've got armour! You can't kill me with that axe now!" Someone else - perhaps with that same Indiana Jones world-weary look - promptly invents the gun.

Pimp my Armour, coming soon! Presented by Richard Holmes!

When the person in the armour staggers away, badly injured, jumps into their castle and yells, "Yeah well, I'm surrounded by thick bloody walls now! A castle - like architectural armour!"

Someone else sighs, yawns and just makes the gun bigger. Like really big. And shoots a massive hole in the castle.

Now, we've got weapons that destroy whole cities and no-one - the world over- dare twirl their sword too much.

Army of Two's whole premise - in terms of the actual action - is the idea that hundreds of years of technological progress hasn't occurred and armour still works. This means that two steroid-chugging American mercenaries (one big and butch and HARDCORE GUNPLAY, BITCH, one whiney and slight and a bit I WANNA BE A IN A BAND) dropped into the middle of an entire country of enemy troops can kill their way out of it with ease and take dozens of bullets to a metal hockey mask - at close range, no less - without curling their lip with exertion.

Real modern-day armour.

ARMY OF TWO!!!!!!'s version.

Obviously this is a fallacy on some hitherto un-reaped level of ridiculous. Real PMC's must - I assume - have a significant technological edge over insurgent forces in the Third World, be it with communications, air and artillery support, spy drones and intelligence of the real "They are the little men over there" kind.

However, I imagine the real difference is that whereas your average insurgence is rather chaotic and badly organised, the PMC's have years of combat experience and are - on a purely tactical level - better at the bangers and mash of soldiery.

The comparison - and again, this is an assumption - I imagine one could draw is that of a SWAT team or Armed Response Unit going up against a load of bank robbers.

The idea of a game where you out-strategise a far numerically superior force of insurgent rebels is an intriguing one. Perhaps something akin to GRAW only, you know, more intensely tactical like a Swat game.

Real Private Military Contractors.

Army of Two!!!!!!!!!!!!!!'s version

Army of Two simply boils down all this rather interesting potential to - as mentioned - your avatars wearing huge amounts of metal clobber which is capable of taking an insane amount of punishment, including the legendary hockey masks and - my personal favourite- a codpiece with MERC etched on it, visible in the above picture. It makes for a fairly arresting image, I suppose, and that's what game marketing is all about but its very, very silly.

So is pimping a diamond studded shield to a bright gold assault rifle, adding a barrel three quarters of a mile long, and - just for good measure - sticking a shotgun front piece on it. Sadly, this is what you have to do if you want your weaponry to have any effect more permanent than a mild bruise.

Fortunately, by the time you complete the first level, you should have enough money to buy a SAW with an extended 120 round clip. And then the rest of the game is pretty easy.

The other selling point of the game is the fact that it was apparently built from the ground up for two player co-op. This is why my friend and I bought it and played it. I know nothing of the single-player experience and care not a jot. I wanted co-op. Like Gears of War's brilliant two-player mode but even more so.

Sadly, the simplest way to describe the extreme disappointment of the co-op in Army of Two is to say, should you want a two-player, split-screen, same room experience, you're still better off with getting Gears.

The trouble is largely how Army of Two forces you to play. It wants one player to build up all the Aggro, go bright red like a well-flogged penis, and get the attention of every single soldier on the level. Then, your mate is nice and opaque and can sneak around the side of the enemy.

"Flame on!"
"Shut up, man!"

The fact of the matter is, as much as my friend and I tried it, the central gameplay is not only broken - and it is, fundamentally so - but actually no more effective that taking the levels conventionally, just clearing stage by stage of enemies in as natural a way as you would.

Now, its not the case that we simply weren't good enough at the game, my friend has completed it - on the hardest difficulty - on his own and I'm not too shabby either. It worked out that, once the invisibility thing was working and the Aggro was all on me (Mr Saw), my friend (Mr Death Whisper) would sneak round the flank and open up. However, the AI immediately notices when some of its men are being wasted. They run away and open fire at the previous invisible mate and the Aggrometer at the side of the screen does a crazy swing-dance, unable to decide who deserves more attention.

The other thing is that you don't build up Aggro simply by shooting (as I had imagined), you can pour hundreds of rounds at targets but gain nothing in the way of the little red bar if you don't hit anything. You need to be accurate, which means taking time over your shots which means not killing quick enough to necessarily build up Aggro. Surely, your huge weight of fire should act as suppression (a tactic the game could have happily plagiarised from Brothers in Arms) and gain Aggro accordingly.

Also - there's this stupid game-play conceit where if you build up enough Aggro, you unlock a special Overkill mode. The Aggro-ised player gets double damage and Mr Death Whisper can run right up to the enemy and hit them in the face with the car door, or race around the rear of one of the game's extraordinarily irritating, heavily armoured (of course) MG emplacements and shoot the absolutely hell out of the gunner.

Of course, apart from a few choke-points in the game's badly designed interior levels where the power up is basically obligatory to progress - you only ever get Overkill when you've basically cleared the room anyway. Meaning one final little Muslim terrorist gets the full brunt of the ARMY OF TWO!!!

Having burnt the inconsequential witch of Main Gameplay at the stake, its time to discuss the other ways EA tries to cram the Two Player-ness down your throat.

1/ Every door needs you and your partner to press A simultaneously. Sometimes this means both pressing a button at the same time. Suggesting that Al Queda always expected to be attacked by someone playing an FPS not - conveniently for you - an ARMY OF TWO!!!! Most of the time, though, it leads to a cutscene where, together, with the strength afforded to them merely because they are AN ARMY OF TWO, Mr Big and Mr Suicide-Girls tear the doors out of the way. Variously - elevator doors, the walls of a metal cage where Mr Escort Mission has been kept for years and, best of all, the exterior hull door of an aircraft carrier.

2/ At any point, you can go over to your partner and press A to handshake or air guitar or, ludicrously, have the big guy sing, "Salem, Salem, Salem" to the theme of Rawhide. This serves no purpose. Alternatively, if you're, for whatever reason, pissed off with your partner and unable to convey this in real life - via microphone or a sneaky on-the-sofa elbow nudge or shrieked cursing-their-incompetence - you can press Right Trigger and, in the game, slap them round the head or head butt them. Its pointless and, honestly, you simply won't ever do it, unless you're pissing about and want to get your partner killed and so activate the little dance routines mid-combat.

If you do wish to use them, its better to wait until you you hear the end of combat, GOW-style gong of "Everyone's been fucked up, bro!"

You can also swap guns. You will never do this.

3/ Co-Op sniping. The sniper rifles are the most supremely useless weapons in the games. Save yourself the shitty bother of these unskippably bad bits and just nominate one guy to fire twice.

4/ Co-Op parachuting. One guy directs the chute, one guy snipes. As I've said, the sniper rifles are useless and you're generally shooting moving targets while swinging about like a huge, erect penis beneath a parachute canopy. In fact, I think this only happens two or three times in the game, as if the designers realised how awful it is. The most protracted sequence sees you jumping off a cliff using a parachute someone Mr Escort Mission has conveniently left at the edge of said cliff. After which, you clearly hang-glide for ages through endless Afghan caverns with the parachute obstinately refusing to act even a little like a real one.

"Weeeee-" "Shut up, man!"

5/ Step-Up. In which you engage in face-off break dancing with Islamic fundamentalist dance troops from across the see-through global conspiracy.

Of course not. That'd be a pathetic attempt at silliness in this well-grounded, well-structured, thinking man's action title.

At points in the game, the stairs have been shot away. A single man could not traverse such an obstacle but you ARE THE ARMY OF TWO. One man lifts the other, he pokes his head up, checks for targets, shoots the absolute putrefied shit out of them if they're there, then clambers up. He reaches down and pulls you up.

Its pointless and boring and happens with that sort of Only-In-A-Game frequency that makes you roll your eyes and pierce your foreskin with needles full of The Cancer.

The mask not only stops bullets, it apparently stops you from being deafened, too.

6/ You drive a hover boat together. In the Kill The Asians level, its really crap and the water effects are straight out of the PS2. In the Kill Fellow Americans level, its better but - wherever you are - its unremittingly dull.

7/ Back-to-Back modes that, as far as I can, try to replicate the end of Doug Liman's Mr and Mrs Smith to the point it might be an overt reference. These are shit. The sooner you can detach from it and return to the cover hiding normal action the better.

"Cheek to cheek-" "Shut up, man!"

About that, actually. Not having a button to bind you do cover is actually a really irritating hindrance. You very rarely bind when you don't want you, yes, but when you do want to, you end up ducking and running straight into the sandbag wall or whatever until the game decides what to do with you.

And that's, uh, it. When your partner dies, you can drag them about and heal them. Often, its easier just to clear the area as quick as you can and then find them. Unfortunately, this whole aspect of the game is marred by the fact that, if you do die, you then instantly jump back up and sprawl into the sitting position in which the dragging animation actually works.

"He ain't heavy, he's my-" "Shut up, man!"*

As you play Army of Two, you never really feel like the game has embraced its own hype. There's nothing you do that makes you particularly act at a team. Indeed, with the constant Kill Tallies and remarkably unfunny banter, you can feel like two guys in complete competition at times. As the friend with whom I played this mediocre-at-best title with said, "I was expecting their constant insulting of one another to come to a head or something. But nothing happens."

In fact, an end level where you fight each other - finally driven apart by Mr Eat Bauer For Breakfast's insistence to occasionally trip Mr Fallout Boy over as they enter a room (do mercenaries really do that in hostile zones?) - would have been amazing. Certainly better than the storyline of the game which is, well... there isn't one. There just isn't.

Any attempt to build on the characters at all would have been welcome. Any suggestion that being a mercenary wasn't sunshine, lollipops and blood drenched, high-paying rainbows would have been great.

Instead, the game simply flits from one hoo-aah to another, killing the usual tick list of current foreign threats. And you wear fucking armour.

Things that are this stupid are at least generally quite big. Army of Two is criminally short. I reckon that you and a committed friend will take two afternoons at most to play through this. After you do so, I doubt you'll feel an urge to play any more. The more you play, the more you find the game hateful and annoying.

This was such a good idea. A two player game with ground-up co-op, based around the morally very dark grey area of Private Military Contractors, not without a sense-of-humour... it could have been hopelessly terrific. The trouble is that without a story to speak of, you have to focus on the combat and, sadly, the combat is utterly banal and lifeless.

Also, shooting suicide bombers in the chest. A game dynamic even Uwe Boll would probably call fucking retarded.

The only really exciting bit is some FMV with a jet plane. That says a lot.


*Banter in these captions is guaranteed 120% more witty than any incongruous discussions about the Wu-Tang clan and the NFL.
----

Jachap has handies of two, right at the end of his armies.

Bully or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Shooting Small Girls in the Neck with Bottles

You may remember, reader, that I traded this...

"I gave her the finger. She bled to death in twelve seconds."

For this....

"I gave him the finger. He stuck me in detention."

A better choice I have seldom made in my short life's comings and goings. If there is one single problem with Assassin's Creed, it's that it sorely lacks fun. Its full of frustration and boredom and tedious repetition.

"Oh, gee, Dude, that first view of Damascus, oh man, it made me wanna jizz." "Totally, bro."

"IN BULLY I STUFFED A KID IN A BIN!"

Here's the crux of what I'm trying to say:

IN BULLY

I STUFFED

A KID

IN A BIN

It's just pure, silly fun, from start to finish. There's no silly sci-fi, there's no layer upon layers of reality and you can't jump off very high towers. Bully may not be particularly clever, but it's a game that loves you. A game that wants you to play it and have a good time.

The loving carress of Bully is so much more appealing than Assassin Creed's insistence on slapping you around the face at every opportunity.

All those interminable, non interactive cut scenes... In Bully the cutscenes but they're skippable (always a good choice) but they're actually mildly amusing to watch if you don't skip them. The humour can be misfiring at times but even misfiring humour is better than the staid, dour discussion of Middle Eastern socio-politics every single chat in Assassin's Creed seems to become.

In Assassin's Creed, you are constantly chased by guards, muslims, Crusaders (and, perhaps the game's worst idea - tramps) in Bully you are similarly pursued by Prefects and teachers and greasers. Not every chase becomes the same irritating block-block-kill swordfight. You can outrun your pursuers. Generally, the teachers get tried and give up. Alternatively, you can outwit them quite neatly and give them the slip by doubling-back or sprinting down a short cut they can't reach.

This, again, is infinitely preferable to the belief shattering instances in Creed where you sit on a bench and everyone quietly forgets about you.

Total Film employ an entertainment graph, charting an audience's approximate reaction to a film's highs and lows. It'd be interesting to apply this to games. Certainly, in Bully, every chase nudges your enjoyment up just a little. It's a short adrenaline rush before returning you to the game proper.

In Assassin's Creed, I found all too often, the chase resulted in the termination of the level and, subsequently, all enjoyment.

In Bully, if you get caught, you can hammer Y to escape. You stomp on toes and grab a handful of scrote and flee. You have literally minutes to escape in.

If you can caught - the penalty is not death. You simply get slightly relocated - you may fail the mission a bit - or dragged to class.

This is a game that thrives on giving the player second chances to remedy their mistakes. And that punishment, going to class... well, that's actually fun too.

It should have been a case of "Fucking mini-games!" but the tasks are simple, diverting and actually a little addictive. I became something of a star pupil for a while, trying to complete them. Nicely, and in keeping with the game's very laid-back massage of the player, there's very little in the way of penalties for totally messing up.

In Biology, you dissect animals. In Geography, you have to label countries. Music is a rhythm game. They're all fun to do. If you complete them, you do get certain bonuses (back to this in a moment).

Failing missions. Another aspect of both games where we can draw a direct comparison. In Bully, I failed about three and completed them on a second or third attempt. The game really feels as if it's trying to help you, not setting out to defeat you, to stumble you and nudge you off that last rooftop before the Assassin's Bureau... into the path of forty-five enraged infidel invaders, you then hack your way through.

Another example: all games like this have their collectibles. It seems to be something that died out for a while but is now back with a vengeance. There's always laptops to discover or packages on top of the buildings to pick up. Crackdown actually made it an absolute crucial part of the gameplay (and, in my opinion, that really worked).

Most collectible based side-quests (if they really warrant the term) are walkthrough-requiring, nagging, horrible bits of padding. The flags in Assassin's Creed are useless and snucked away in little nooks you'd never actually have a reason to visit in the game properly. I genuinely believe that you have to be wired differently, as a person, to want to hunt such things out.

TRADE THIS IN FOR BULLY

In Bully, if you complete Geography, it unlocks the locations of the collectibles on your minimap, meaning you essentially have a built in guide to finding them. Like the greyed locations in Fallout 3, this is actually a huge encourage to explore and find the things. More games should do this.

In general terms, Bully's learning curve is so meanderingly slight, its really less of a curve, more of a lean. Its like one of the cool kids, foot jacked up against the wall, propped in the corner looking moody and dangerous.

In short, it's easy. For some reason, the word "easy" has negative connotations.

Easy women are riddled with disease. Easy money is to be treated suspiciously, it's how the shadowy cousin who you never see at Christmas can afford that new Jag. Easy decisions spell catastrophe. Easy games are to be feared like casual racism or the Bubonic Plague.

I think the reasoning for this is that people assume, if a game is easy, the player will simply breeze through it. If there's no challenge, surely it's boring?

You can actually apply that exact criticism to Assassin's Creed. The fact I can hold three buttons, choose a direction, and the game will happily do the rest - is boring. It's actually disappointing. If there's no challenge to climbing that tower, if scaling it is not an act of player skill, then what's the point?

I would generally think, "God, this is easy," immediately before slipping off that final rooftop. The arbitrary spikes of difficulty, secreted in the game, that feel almost exactly like running hard into a thick, unrelenting wall.

In Bully, there is too much to do and too much fun to be had. The ease in which you complete tasks feels like a triumph in the design of the levels and the design of interface.

TRADE THIS IN FOR BULLY

It's impossible to categorise Bully into a "Its a bit like X or Y, with a dash of Z." Particularly in terms of finding a game with a comparative difficulty level. It's an Open World game and we've basically all had enough of them now, but, because it features a smaller play area full of incident and character (as opposed to vast expanses of open ground full of exactly nothing) it transcends the form.

Allow me to get a little wanky for a moment. Bully was not comparable to my usual game-playing experience. My standard operating procedure, in the form of a stream of conciousness, is as follows:

"DIE DIE DIE RUN PRESS A ARGH WANKER DIE RELOAD SHIT ON ME RELOAD YOU FUCK DIE DIE DIE DUCK DUCK JUMP - Phew. Cutscene - WHAT THE FUCK NO SKIP WANNA SKIP DIE DIE DIE DIE CAN'T SHOOT BUGGER"

Bully, by comparison, was more a warm feeling as one might feel at the end of a rather spiffing summer day. It was a fun, gentle, endearing experience. It was refreshing not to obsess over the difficulty, over sudden cul-de-sacs in the game's progress where you die over and over and over again, and just enjoy the experience.

Indeed, it will always be a puzzle to me why some people obsess over difficulty so much...

"I completed it on Legendary."
"Oh, I did it on Normal."
"YOU FUCKING SUCK!"
"I have several other endeavours in my life that I prioritise above game completion!"
"YOU. FUCKING. SUCK."

This XBox Live, Gamerpoint, One UpManship has always irritated me.

Unless the difficulty settings add something to the missions (Hello, Mr TimeSplitters, Monsieur Goldeneye) or are cleverly assessed (Good morrow to you, Dr Call of Duty 4 OBE) or, in fundamental ways, utterly affect the game (Great to see you, Madame Crysis, Lord Flashpoint) - surely the game should have one single setting. The "Just Challenging Enough" setting. Anything below this is just patronising.

This difficulty setting is for players who have never held a controller before and, up until this point, thought Solitaire and Minesweeper were the only computer games that existed.

Anything above? Masochism, pure and simple.

I don't want to get stuck in a bin by a game and pissed on by all the cool kids. I want to chortle away happily, as I'm the one who deals out the punishment.

Hello there, Monsieur Crackdown and young Bully, esquire. Its an absolute pleasure.

It really, really is.

Let's have a few more games where I can, in a gameplay sense, stick people in bins.

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Jachap found all the rubber bands.