Developer: Visceral Montreal
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Platform: PS3, 360
Army of Two: The Devil’s Cartel – Review
Army of Two: The Devil’s Cartel is the third installment in the Army of Two series. Sadly the game came out quite suddenly without much announcement. The Devil’s Cartel does an attempt to stroll down a different path than its predecessors. Sadly not all changes are good ones.
Story:
In Army of Two: The Devil’s Cartel you will play with the generically named Alpha and Bravo. At the start of the game Alpha, Bravo and several other T.W.O. operatives are guarding a convoy which is transporting the Mexican politician Cordova. Cordova’s life is in danger because he is trying to bring down the cartel ‘La Guadana’ and kill their leader Esteban Bautista. The convoy then inevitably gets ambushed, the cartel manages to capture Cordova and kill most of the T.W.O. operatives guarding the convoy, so it quickly becomes Alpha and Bravo’s mission to free Cordova, capture or kill Esteban and kill just about every cartel member in the process. During their mission, Alpha and Bravo run into of some kind of resistance movement that want to take down the cartel as well. Alpha and Bravo will try to meet up with a contact from this group which will help them find Esteban Bautista. Salem and Rios, the playable characters from the previous Army of Two games also have a major part to play in the story, even though you won’t see them too often. You will also meet up with other T.W.O. operatives, but these characters usually have a low life expectancy and are very forgettable. Overall the story is pretty bland and forgettable, there is a plot-twist in there, but you’ll probably see it coming a mile away, which might slightly annoy you if you’ve played the previous Army of Two games.
Alpha and Bravo, like their names, are pretty generic and uninteresting. They don’t have a lot of personality and their relationship doesn’t seem to grow much from their very first mission as a team (which you get to play in a flash back), until five years later when the major part of the story takes place. Their dialogue is pretty limited and usually is so bad it’s funny (you can take that as a positive or a negative). They some times make references to their personal life, but these moment are quite rare and are never really fleshed out. This results in Alpha and Bravo being totally forgettable.
The story in this game is really just an excuse to make you shoot at stuff.
Graphics:
The graphics of this game are good, but not great. The area’s you come through are usually unimaginative and the color pallet is quite dull.
The high point of the graphics is probably the destructible environment. It can be fun to look at the destruction you caused after some major firefight. This has been done better in other games though. There are some minor bugs when bodies float in the air or get stuck on objects in a weird way, but these are far from being game breaking. Another good point is that the game runs smoothly during split-screen co-op with barely any noticeable loss of quality.
Sound:
The sound design of this game, again, is decent but nothing spectacular. Each gun has it’s own distinctive sound and the voice acting is pretty good. There are some minor issues like the sound of guns and explosions being so loud that you’ll have difficulties to hear what the characters are saying, resulting in you not quite knowing what you’re supposed to do. But this is not that big of a deal as your objective is usually marked on your screen (it will also be most likely in the direction of the guys that are shooting at you). The soundtrack of the game is totally generic and forgettable, in fact I can’t even remember how it goes as I’m writing this review.
Gameplay:
Army of Two: The Devil’s Cartel is a cover based third person shooter. The cover mechanic allows you to jump from cover to cover smoothly and works most of the time, but it can feel a bit slow and do things that you didn’t mean to from time to time. Overall your mobility feels quite restrictive, your character moves quite slowly and there is no combat roll, you’re rarely quick enough to get out of the way of a grenade explosion and you sometimes won’t be able to jump off small elevations in the terrain.
The co-op aspects of this game are quite limited as well, the only co-op actions you can perform are jumping over walls, breaching doors simultaneously, reviving your downed partner and have one of you draw enemy fire while the other flanks them. The game does encourage you to play together instead of just looking after yourself by awarding you points for all kinds of team play. Which results in a constant barrage of messages which are often not clear, as it is still not clear to me what the defference between a decoy and a bait is, or a flank and a surprise. The points you are awarded fill up your overkill meter which, once full, allows you to go in overkill mode. While in overkill mode, you will be invincible and have unlimited ammo for a limited amount of time. During overkill your ammo will also have extra explosive damage, which results in the visually most pleasing of the game as you destroy most of the destructible environment in your area.
The enemies in the game are all quite harmless and lack any sense of threat, their only danger lies in their sheer numbers or when a wave of enemies suddenly spawns on one of your flanks. The enemy AI is quite thick, as they will not try to flank you and sometimes just suicidally charge at you or let you come up close to melee them without even shooting at you. It is also only their numbers which make you grateful for your partner, as he can help you drawing their fire or flanking them while they are focused on shooting you. The partner AI is thankfully not too bad as it will always try to revive you and is perfectly capable of taking care of itself, you also have the possibility to give it some simple commands.
The game also features a so called TWO-vision, which allows you to see a liable tactical path you can take to overcome the enemies. This feature is quite useless however as the TWO-vision basically only tells you what the best path you can take from cover to cover to get forward a bit.
The game is broken up in sometimes laughably short sections, at the end of which you are awarded cash based on your performance. This cash can then be used to buy new masks, outfits, tattoos, guns and also lets you buy for modification for your guns. The gun modifications
are quite extensive and give you a sense of attachment to your weapon.
The game features an 8 hour-ish campaign and a few contract missions, in which you are constantly in overkill mode, that’s it, there’s nothing more. There is no competitive multiplayer or any kind of bonus objectives which give doesn’t give this game much of replayability.
The game doesn’t really do anything wrong gameplay wise, it just doesn’t do anything particularly good either.
Conclusion:
Despite the numerous shortcomings of this game, I have to admit that it was still fun to play it with a buddy. Most of the bad writing or minor bugs just gave us a good laugh and none of them where at any point really irritable. Unfortunately there are not a lot of games that come out these days, which allow you to play together with a buddy on your couch. So if your looking for a game to play split-screen over the weekend Army of Two: The Devil’s Cartell will definitively scratch that itch. Just consider renting it… And don’t play it alone, there are way better games than this if you’re looking for a single player experience.
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