Army of TWO: The Devil’s Cartel is touted as a no-holds-barred over-the-shoulder shooter of epic proportions which sees you in control of a pair of rookie mercenaries under the watchful guidance of veteran operatives Salem and Rios who were the stars of the previous game.

With this being the third game in this franchise and the first to run on the Frostbite 2 engine, I was expecting some sharp and slick visuals, and granted, the game at it’s best is visually intense, fast-paced and provides plenty of simultaneous enemies to blow to pieces. The AI is half decent and just as you are encouraged to work with your partner to flank your enemies and spring surprise attacks, the enemies in AoT will do the same – some with more success than others.

Story

You’re in control of newbie mercenaries “Alpha” and “Bravo” (first red flag), as the Trans World Operations (T.W.O.) team are tasked with protecting Cordova, a Mexican politician, against La Guadana a corrupt and powerful drug cartel. However, your convoy is attacked and the newbie duo gets separated from Cordova. Then suddenly the game jumps back five years to Alpha and Bravo’s first mission to save some girl, unfortunately they’re too late to save her, but another girl who’s also being held captive is still alive, her name is Fiona, and the group of mercenaries argue about what to do with her.

Rios and Alpha don’t want to leave her behind because “she’s innocent” but veteran merc Salem doesn’t see the point in saving her as she’s ‘off-objective’ but the others insist and Salem pushes ahead alone. Things happen in between – run and gun, run and gun – and following a brutal enemy assault Salem is presumed dead.

Fast forward to present day Mexico after team TWO are separated from Cordova and making their way to an extraction point when their driver, Mason is killed, so the pair travel to meet his contact who turns out to be the woman they saved five years prior, Fiona (second red flag).

I won’t breakdown the rest of the story, as it will completely ruin the game for you, but expect more twists and turns on the way.

Gameplay

This game feels like Time Crisis meets Gears of War, you spend short sections running and gunning your way through streets, buildings, aeroplane yards, cemeteries, crypts, drug dens and all sorts. After each section is complete you’re awarded cash for kills and actions. But the real pay off is when you combine with your partner as well as racking up a good body count when you fill your “aggro gauge” and f*ck sh*t up in “Overkill mode” by pressing L2 or Down on the D-Pad.

There’s a wide range of decently customizable guns of which you can carry three at any one time – a main, a secondary and a side arm. To get access to weapons and upgrades you have to buy them in the armoury but once I’d found a combo that I liked with a decent balance of damage/reload/range I didn’t see much point in upgrading or buying any of the other weapons as you can pick up situation-necessary weapons from dead enemies, predictably and conveniently when you need them.

The outfits and masks you can wear are quite varied and include some fun nods to a couple of the other EA titles including Deadspace and Medal of Honour, but the real fun is in the ability to create your own custom masks. With a little time and some creativity, you can recreate a number of well-known characters. I went for my favourites – Iron Man and an attempt at Venom from Spiderman.

There’s little variation in the actual gameplay though and after the first couple of levels your quite literally going through the motions, shooting holes in endless wave after wave of cartel members and as the games characters even remark – it’s as if they’ve recruited the whole of Mexico. The run and gun action is broken up by cut-scenes and moments when you have to hold your ground or jump on a turret, either mounted, on the back of a vehicle or out of a helicopter. These sequences are quite fun to be fair as you mix it up between shooting out a car’s tires, the engine or shooting the driver to see which will f*ck up the other pursuing cartel cars more.

The story tries to provide some intrigue and suspense but the actions of the characters are so frustratingly illogical I spent more time shouting “stop talking and just shoot him – end it all now FFS!” at the screen, than actually enjoying it. And my frustrations didn’t end there – the game is incredibly glitchy. Perhaps I got a bad copy but at times my partner would stay hidden behind cover as if there was one last enemy hiding, despite him exclaiming “AREA CLEAR”, and if ‘pause-unpause-pause-unpause’ didn’t work, I’d have to nudge him over to the checkpoint so that gameplay would continue. At other times, my gun would inexplicably point upwards or down and I couldn’t control it, I couldn’t duck into cover or fire back at the enemies shooting and throwing grenades at my apparently blind mercenary. There’s too many examples to list interestingly but the real kicker was near the end of the game when I would complete the final action sequence watch the cut-scene and then instead of showing me the score for the level it would claim one of my team had been killed and ask me if I’d like to restart or quit – unsurprisingly, I chose quit a couple of times.

Verdict

If you’ve read this far down, you probably think I hated this game, but in short; I didn’t. Taken at face value, it’s a straightforward run and gun with some good old fashioned explosive and high impact fun. If it wasn’t for the glitches and frustrating character behaviour during the story, I would probably have enjoyed this a lot more, but even with it’s setbacks, it was entertaining and particularly satisfying when the aggro gauge was full giving me the chance to let rip and shoot unlimited ammo into anything that moved and destroying everything in it’s path.

However, up against other similar quality titles such as Gears of War, Battlefield, even Medal of Honour, it lacks the character depth, the visual quality or scale to hold it’s own against the competition. The custom masks option is probably the only real “edge” I can see is, it’s a great feature, but even that could be improved by giving players more slots to add elements as it’s arbitrarily limited to 10.

Overall, Army of Two gave me about eight hours of half decent action, although I didn’t get a chance to try multiplayer as the EA Network was having issues, but I suspect that multiplayer is where this game could come into it’s own as playing against human intelligence will be more rewarding and fun with everyone wearing custom masks.

I wouldn’t pay full price for this, but discounted, on a deal, or with a trade in – it’s not a terrible shout provided the glitches are fixed with patches.

RATING:

3 out 5 DDs