Okay, this game is good. I’ll say it. But let me explain why. It was designed for two player co-op. It uses the unreal 3 engine and it also sports a very nice physics engine as well. So it looks great, and people die and go down great. So, Krztov and I played this through all the way in two nights, online in co-op story mode(campaign mode). The single player mode is the same as the online co-op story mode(campaign mode). We had a couple of hiccups, the game would crash in one spot(it crashed twice, well dropped a player out), but once we got past it we never had that problem again. I really did like the story, and it surprised me. So it has a lot of cliche crap in it, but I did like the government conspiracy stuff that was in it. I love the metal Masks the two main characters wear. This game has character as a whole though. I liked most of the characters over all. The enemy AI is not that bad, they don’t stand around and let you shoot them, if you run up to them, and they see you, they will usually start running away firing. If you can catch up to them, you can melee attack them, and there is a canned animation, randomly that will happen. Some of the melee attacks are hilarious, I loved grabbing guys by the head and throwing them around. You have to react quick. In the single player game, the AI of your comrade is not the best, but usually pretty decent. I did not have problems with him dragging me to wrong spots to heal me like a lot of other reviewers have stated. I also really liked the level designs. We had a lot of fun playing this co-op. It can also be played split screen. So over all so far I have enjoyed the game. I am not saying the game is perfect at all though.

Now for some negativity. Okay, I have been playing a lot of Call of Duty 4. So when I started playing this, at first I could not get my head around the controls. It plays like Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune(except uncharted controls are perfect, these are not) ala over the shoulder(ahahah like the ministry song). There is slowdown when there is tons of gunfire and a lot of enemies around. This doesn’t get to bad most of the time, but when it does, the control inputs get sluggish and will usually over respond or under respond. By level 3 I got used to it. There was also slowdown on the hovercraft missions as well. The controls kind of sucked on that. I don’t understand why epic does the unreal engine fast, but everyone else has massive slow down. It makes no sense to me. Sometimes the textures on some of the landscapes looked kind of weak, but sometimes just right.

Honestly over all, once I got used to the controls(I got used to the slow down too, which changes how it controls), it was a lot of fun. You have to use strategy to win the levels, you cannot just run in shooting. One person can shoot and get the “AGGRO” which means the enemies will pay attention to the person with the aggro, then the other player can flank, sneak behind and shoot and kill. This is very necessary on some of the stronger bad guys that can only be shot in the back. The weapon upgrading is cool, being able to bling the weapons out in gold and diamonds ahahaah improves the aggro of your player. There are plenty of cool guns you can buy and upgrade as you earn cash in your missions. The money and upgrading really adds a neat dimension to the game that I liked a lot. Also, having a headset for online co-op is a must. Unfortunatly one thing I noticed about online in game chat, is that if a lot starts happening the chat audio will stutter and drop out. This sucks, COD4 will drop too. This really irritates me, to the point of now we use skype on our computers while we play. I recommend doing this on all ps3 games honestly. Skype sounds way better and doesn’t bog down the games or drop audio. The other things I really like about this game were the little details, like the friendly jabs and mean jabs you can do to the other player, in fact one of the friendly jabs is a rock out music metal dork air guitar on a gunfest. LOL. It makes me laugh every time for some reason(i’m a dork I guess). I really like when you have to help each other up over ledges as well. It’s funny when you have to shoot while being helped up. One player has to lift the other up. You have to open many doors together as well. They really made this a co-op game through and through.

Ok, now to the online play. There are bugs. Trying to get an online versus game to work is not that easy. Half the time it can never find a server, although I do tend to have better luck trying to find ranked matches. Setting up private online co-op was a breeze though. A lot of people on the net are having problems. If you read the manual, it states that you must have ports 3658 and 6000 open on your network router. I had to turn them on in my network router. I could not play online at all until I turned them on. You will have to know how to do that on your router, so read the network router manual. This is really stupid, because COD4 and Warhawk have no such problems, neither does unreal tournament 3. So EA, FIGURE THIS OUT! People buy consoles to play games, put it in and play, not set up their routers. Stupid. Hell, even Burnout paradise doesn’t have this problem and that is also an EA game. There are bugs, online bugs, server bugs, chat bugs, EA NEEDS TO PATCH THIS FAST!

7.5 Presentation
The menus are bland, The story is ok, I liked it, But it is nothing spectacular over all. The cut screens look amazing though.

9.0 Visuals
A lot of the other reviews really get down on this games graphics, I do not agree. I think it is one of the better looking ps3 games actually. Some of the animations are top notch as well. It’s not perfect, and there are a couple of things that look not so great here and there, but man the water on the air craft carriers was really nifty not to mention the character and gun details of both good guys and bad guys.

8.6 Audio
I liked the music in the whole thing, I think they did a great job on the music and the sound and the voice acting. Well, sometimes the voice acting is B movie quality, but I think it was intentional.

7.0 Game Mechanics
There is a learning curve on the sensitivity of the controls, it’s easy to be aiming at the ground or the sky when you don’t mean to. The slow down really hurts the game play in some spots. The back to back parts were really sluggish and annoying. This is the unreal engine, so i have no idea how they managed to screw this up.

7.0 Replay
The online co-op is good to go for 2 or 3 times around. It’s only 6hrs long in story mode. The multiplayer only has a few modes. In versus, there are only a few maps. I mean very few(4 I think). There are 3 game modes: Extraction, Bounties and Warzones. Good news though, they are promising download content support in the future. That will make me hang on to this, because this is a fun co-op game, and the versus game is fun, not mind blowing, but fun still once you get the hang of them.

7.4 Total Score.
(out of 10 / not an average)

60 bucks is steep for this title. I think it should only cost 49 because it is so short, and the online maps are anemic at best. If this game was 49 dollars, I would of scored it a 7.8, if it had more maps and modes online, + cheaper price, i would of given it an 8.2. As it is, it gets a 7.4. Ea has made another game that I actually paid for. Amazing. They are still making some decent games. I love this because I absolutely love online CO-OP games. Back in the day, fro and I would play descent, quake, rise of the triad,e, and a whole bunch of shooters co-op over the modem. This was the best times i ever had playing multiplayer games. But during the playstation era of gaming, this has long since been forgotten until now. For that, this gets a big thumbs up from me. Because I love co-op games. This game has a few problems. Once you get the hang of it, it is fun. The game goes a long way to really make it feel social and like you really need your partner. Go buy it now if you like co-op games to play with your friends. If you only like single player fps, rent it, and see if you like it first. You might hate it. Click here to buy Army Of Two for Playstation 3.

Music Listened to while writing this review: Ministry - Animositisomnia & Dark Side Of The Spoon.