Army of Two (Xbox 360)

With the understanding of these elements you can swing the battle in your favour and learn to play tactically: rather than DOOM or Quake style. There are several co-op moves available in the SP and the MP, such as the step jump where you can lift up your companion and let them see or shoot over edges of walls (or they can lift you up) controlled by the d-pad. Co-op sniping, parachute jumps where you’re both on the same chute and back to back shooting (which is kind of like a mini-game tension breaker)

During aggro (if you can keep the aggro for a minute or so) you can enter into Overdrive where you’re pretty much unstoppable for a short while, you have infinite ammo and you can rip through hordes of enemies. You can also give an appreciative action (A) or an aggressive one (RT) to your partner to let them know you’re happy or annoyed with something they’ve done. This is more a frivolous move than any kind of important game move, unless you’re playing with a friend over split-screen or live.

As you plough through the missions you’ll get cash from objectives, you’ll get cash from hidden items and you’ll be able to customise your weapons. You can buy new ones, upgrade the ones you do have and the customisation system for the most part is excellent. Every mod changes a stat about the weapon, put a grenade launcher on an AK and watch the weapon’s aggro stat rise. Spend $10,000 and you’ll be able to pimp the weapon out so it takes a John Woo style Face Off appearance, with gold, gems and silver fixtures: watch that aggro stat climb!

You can use a primary, a secondary and a special weapon. These are things like rifles, mini-guns for primary, P90’s, pistols for secondary and sniper rifles for the special weapon. SP aside, Army of Two comes alive when you add a friend and can play the game co-op with them. You can use advanced tactics and plan your battle perfectly. There’s no cover system per-se, the character will crouch behind obstacles and cover but doesn’t stick Gears of War style.

The game features a full co-op campaign as well as online adversarial 2v2 team-based matches. These are split across some pretty decent maps with 3 game modes you can choose from: Extraction, Warzones, Bounties are the modes on offer.

Extraction spawns VIPs and hostages into the map randomly; you have to extract them as the title says.

Bounties give you high profile targets to eliminate and so on.

Warzones mixes the two previous modes, adds additional objectives and all modes give you cash that you can use to buy and upgrade your in-game arsenal. The complete range of co-op moves is available in mp and you will find that you’re not just fighting two human players. The game spawns in enemy AI to liven things up a lot.

There are a few glitches with the in-game GPS and objectives, there are a few problems with the step-jump at the moment and there’s the occasional lag problem here and there. However MP is still a serious amount of fun and its good news that EA are going to support the game with DLC such as new modes and maps.