As with the original Army of Two, the sequel, Army of Two: The 40th Day focuses primarily on co-operative game play and the sequel, Army of Two: The 40th Day is no different as we see the welcome return of Elliot Salem and Tyson Rios, two of the baddest mo-fos to ever fire a rifle.

At the end of the first game, Salem and Rios, along with their mission co-ordinator Alice Murray decided to put together their own freelance private military group known as Trans World Operations (or TWO). Moving to the sequel now and a couple of years later, whilst on a routine mission in Shanghai, Rios and Salem find themselves trapped in a city under siege. Their initial reaction is to locate Alice and leave the city; however things are never that simple in video game land. They are going to have to use all their wits, skill, and ultimately each other to fight for every inch of ground in the city to escape it and along the way they will also have to make life or death decisions that will ultimately test the strength of their, up to now, brotherly bond.

EA have really made some improvements over the first game here, its like they listened to what the public had to say about Army of Two and worked their butts off to fix it. In the first game, if you were playing alone and were injured, your partner would just drag you across the line of fire and you would both end up dying in a hail of bullets, this time around however, the game AI is a lot more intelligent and pulls you both out of the line of fire and to safety in order to heal you. Also, in the original game, co-op moves were fixed to start up at certain places in the game, whereas in The 40th Day, game play has been changed to allow co-op play at any time in the game. You can now tell your partner to move ahead of you at any time when before he probably wouldn’t.

Improvements in other areas include the use of human shields, and instead of having to share the shield as in the first game, now you can each grab a shield and split up to wreak more havoc on the enemy than before. You can both now sprint at any time now which is handy when dodging a lot of bullet fire. Also you can now pick up weapons from your downed enemies and add them to your own, and there is an extra surprise, where you could only carry three guns before, now the amount has been upped to four. You can now shoot clean through flimsier material such as plastic and wood in order to reach your targets hidden on the other side (their own fault for hiding behind a bit of plastic really isn’t it? Those of you who like a clean and varied getaway, you can now choose how you engage your enemy, you can trick them by feigning surrender to them whilst your partner runs around the other side and takes them all out. You can also tie them up instead of killing them outright and did I mention the destructible environment? A whole new ball game of fun right there… Finally, with all the great new stuff, comes the bad new stuff, namely the new heavy armoured enemies, these guys have to be destroyed in a certain manner, such as hitting any carried grenades or gas canisters they have on their person. Once downed, as already mentioned you can take their weapons as your own, and in the instance of the heavy armoured enemies, this means flame throwers and Gatling guns. Awesome.

Of course, it’s not all about improving the first game, some things that worked well the first time around are back, such as the aggro meter. As before, the aggro meter gauges which of the two players is the main focus of the enemy (depending on which players meter is highest) which enables the other player to become practically invisible sneakily outflank them and despatch them quickly and quietly. Also, you can still fight back to back, engage in blind fire, perform step jumps, do the fake death, and the emote factor is back too.

Graphically the game is still brilliant, Shanghai in particular is beautiful to look at and a favourite level of mine is the zoo level. You can also unlock different outfits for the boys once you have beaten the game once. Cut scenes are as good as ever, as are the character models and environments, gore is at a maximum as well, a must for this type of game, and if you have certain types of weapons, you can now blow the heads clean off your enemies… Superb

Verdict:

Gamers have a few tough choices to make this January with three big releases all out in the same month, between Darksiders, Bayonetta and Army of Two: The 40th Day though, I’m confident that this, the latter, is the better choice to make.

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