There's an old cliché about writing checks and the body's ability to pay them, which seems pretty apropos applied to a game about private military contractors. EA Montreal has positioned Army of Two: The 40th Day as a strategic co-operative shooter with a focus on difficult moral choices, implying a story involving private armies and conspiracy in Shanghai. While there's plenty of spectacle and explosions to go around and some improved design and gameplay to be had in this sequel, it fails as often as it succeeds. Ultimately, Army of Two: The 40th Day feels somewhat like another missed opportunity.
Things are a little less bromantic this time around, but you can still sing "My Buddy."
The 40th Day (or TFD from here on out) gets off to a reasonably quick start; you'll go from the standard basic movement tutorial to more complicated co-operative maneuvers in the span of five minutes or so at the beginning of the game, and combat early on establishes that several things have been tweaked for this second helping of the Rios and Salem show.
Where the previous title had visuals subject to the standard boilerplate complaints about UE3 based software (it's too brown, it's too bulky, etc, etc), TFD is full of color, from the bright reds and oranges of Shanghai at sunrise, to the greens of hospital corridors and the vivid scenery of a destroyed Shanghai zoo. In a game that arguably lends itself to dingy and monochromatic, EA Montreal has instead presented a city that seems alive, if wounded and under siege, and it's a welcome shift.
It's a shame then that the enemies don't show more variety. While it's believable for a private army to share fashion sense, it would have been nice to see the EA Montreal step out of that comfort zone. Luckily, those boring enemies are much more quickly dispatched, which helps to make shooting in TFD much more fun than its predecessor.
Even better, the weapon customization from the first game returns in a more robust, flexible form. Enemies drop great quantities of money regularly, and a much better stocked weapons store is accessible at any time. Even better, your weapons and upgrades carry over between playthroughs and saves, lending a loot-centric action-RPG grind aspect to the proceedings, if that's what you want. The aggro system returns from the first game, letting players strategize on the battlefield by drawing enemy attention while their partner flanks and the like. Equipment upgrades allow players to tailor their role to their liking by determining how much aggro to pull.
Less improved are the controls, which actually introduce more problems. The cover system feels insufficient and overly complicated: "A" slides and dives, but doesn't generally stick you to cover like you'd expect it would. Usually, you'll be manually taking cover by manually crouching behind a wall to which your character will stick, and you'll need to manually switch the shoulder you aim over frequently (did you happen to notice how many times I said "manually"?). It's a jarring, idiosyncratic departure from standard third-person shooter controls that doesn't offer any tangible benefits.
I would complain that the story doesn't go anywhere unexpected, but then, it doesn't go anywhere at all. The game seems poised to tell a story that never gets off the ground; the game doesn't introduce its main villain in any way shy of propaganda posters and loading screens until the last areas of the game. When it does, it's because a character inexplicably declaring that the big bad needs to die. There's no effort to interest the player in Rios or Salem (who had more development in their single paragraph introductions than the entirety of the eight hours or so of the campaign), shy of some morally grey banter and jokes.
The much-emphasized hostage situations have next to no effect on the gameplay. While there are occasional rewards for saving hostages (money, a new weapon attachment), money is dished out so freely in the game that there's not much point in worrying if you screw one up. The game's "morality moments" serve to actively discourage the player from investing anything in them. These moments present Rios and Salem with a choice between some kind of personal gain and what appears to be the "right thing to do," followed by a motion-comic style cutscene explaining the consequences of their actions. The problem is, consequences seem arbitrary: if you're trying to play as a jerk, you may do the right thing more often than not, or end up making things worse trying to do the right thing (if your decision matters at all). All of this combined with the disjointed, haphazard plot, served to disconnect me from caring about what was going on.
This brings up a single overarching issue with TFD: inconsistency. It often feels like a garment that wasn't properly sewn together. For example, there are no audio adjustment options in the game at all (which is a problem, given that dialogue and objectives are often drowned out by sound effects or the soundtrack). There are also no subtitles in the game, a curious omission in 2010. The campaign mode will enable you to alter your controls (including left-handed stick options), but multiplayer will not.
Multiplayer here feels like an afterthought. While the standard modes are present, including point-capture-and-hold, deathmatch, and the pre-order exclusive (for a month anyway), a Horde/Firefight style mode called "Extraction," and each is competent, they're all plagued by sluggish controls and a lack of anything really interesting. There's nothing here to keep you coming back beyond the initial "new toy" phase, but it's nice enough that it's there.
In its favor though, playing the game solo is no longer the miserably frustrating experience that it was in the first game, as the level and encounter design is better. The enemy AI isn't as ruthless as the last game, managing to challenge without feeling unfair. Usually.
Army of Two: The 40th Day doesn't quite have enough on its balance sheet to cash the checks it's written. While the gameplay and level design is improved and it's a good looking game, the unsatisfying narrative, boring characters, and overly gimmicky morality system combine with forgettable multiplayer and strange mechanics decisions to deliver a sequel that succeeds more than its forebear, but fails to be more than a pretty good third person shooter during a lean time for the sub-genre. If the loot aspect and co-operative play sound like they'd be a good fit, you might give TFD a try. Otherwise, you could have better luck elsewhere.
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