Army of Two: Preview

Army of Two: Preview

Punit Lodaya, Aug 01, 2006 1700 hrs IST

Army of Two looks incredible and has the potential to revolutionize strategic co-operative play.

Expert Review

Developer: EA Montreal
Platform: XBox 360, Playstation 3
Release Date: 2007

Army of Two looks incredible and has the potential to revolutionize co-operative play. Co-operative play has been here for ages and dates back to as early as Contra(1987) or even before. While other games concentrate on single player campaigns and just add an option of co-operative play for a pinch, Army of Two revolves around two playable characters which can be either controlled by two different people or one of them will be controlled by the game's AI. The game play has been specially designed for co-operative play, which means without the two characters, this game isn't playable.

This unique co-operative third person shooter is scheduled to hit the next-gen consoles namely PlayStation 3 and XBOX 360, sometime in 2007. As the name suggest, the game is based on two mercenaries Tyson Rios and Elliot Salem, which has been created by the same guy who designed Splinter Cell's Sam Fisher. They work on hire basis in Private Military Corporation (PCM) and are hired for security or as a supplementary force to the military forces. PCM is well known for doing the dirty job that the regular government military can't do or won't do. Basically, you get the point.

Two to Tango

If you don't have a buddy to play this game, don't be disappointed. The game's AI is considered to the best seen till date. Your AI controlled partner can give you high fives on a successful mission and even show the middle finger in case something goes wrong. The game has been designed to assist each other while completing the level. You can chuck ammo to each other in case one of them goes low on ammo. One of them can tie a rope around his waist and act as an anchor, while his partner will climb down the building. Tyson and Elliot both have been given two different personalities and to add some more masala, EA invented a system called Adaptive AI. The AI of the player changes depending on the how good or bad you have been. If you target innocent civilians, the other partner will even point a gun at you, first giving you a warning not to shoot at them. EA claims, it will be hard to differentiate between a real player and the AI partner.

Here's one in-game example being showcased. Now there's a high ledge to climb over. So, first one of the partners will give a boost to another one to reach and climb the ledge. After that, the partner who got the boost can give his hand down, so that the other partner can also climb up.

So, how do you give commands to you partner? Well, over the headset. The game's built-in speech recognition seems to a pretty good, it very well recognizes the commands given over the headset. It would have been difficult to give proper commands with a joy pad or even writing over the keyboard in war like situations.