- #ARMY OF TWO ALPHA MOVIE#
- #ARMY OF TWO ALPHA PLUS#
- #ARMY OF TWO ALPHA SERIES#
- #ARMY OF TWO ALPHA FREE#
At no point does it engage in the type of goofiness or bombast of something like The Expendables. Yager’s game was built to do two things: Lay bare the vapid cruelty of this brand of shooter that’s become the national product of video game land, and to re-tell the Heart of Darkness, the story of how humans will always lose their humanity when they go to war.Īrmy of Two: The Devil’s Cartel was seemingly built for no reason. Spec Ops is an important comparison point, though. It doesn’t have the weight or smarts of a Gears of War, but it’s better than the combat of Uncharted 3 where the artificial intelligence has the smarts of a Roomba, and its more tightly paced than the messy Spec Ops: The Line. well, everything else, the shooting plays well. It’s called “Fashion Police.” Wait, Why Are We in Mexico?ĭespite the poor. Some wear little hats and you can earn an achievement for shooting them off. There are hundreds upon hundreds of these guys to shoot, almost all of them identical. Or to buy a mask painted like Captain America’s shield. The cash is spent on a mountain of new parts for your guns to make them work better. Run past a guy and distract him so your partner can shoot him, that’s a bonus for acting as bait. With each kill, a little dollar sign pops up.
#ARMY OF TWO ALPHA FREE#
Shoot enough guys and a meter fills up so you can go into “Overkill” mode, where the screen goes gold and you’re invincible, free to shoot away with infinite ammo. You duck behind cover, some of which can be chipped away, and pop out shooting with a variety of machineguns and shotguns. In one bright scene, they even fight in a town square decked out for the Dia de los Muertos festival, with fireworks boxes replace the omnipresent explosive barrels as environmental weapons. La Guadana fights you in the streets, shanty towns, old hotels, graveyards, air fields, sewers any locale with video game history, really. What you’re doing throughout that introduction and across the six to seven hours that follow is shooting the endless hordes of La Guadana, the best staffed drug cartel in the world. It happens so slowly, that it takes awhile to realize that the game never even bothered to explain why the hell you’re doing anything at all. After an hour and change, then its back to the main story.
#ARMY OF TWO ALPHA PLUS#
A motorcade gets blown up by those goons in the opening scene, hinting that the action is going to start in medias res, but no! First, you have to go into not one, but two flashbacks, one for training to shoot stuff, the second to explain why Salem and Rios, the protagonists of the previous games, are absent, plus it introduces the fearless female lead Fiona. Alpha and Bravo are employees of TWO, a private military organization hired to protect a politician in a Mexican city dead set on fighting the vicious cartel that controls the area. There is some awkwardness here and there with its pacing, but the game doesn’t do much to try and tell a story. Let me be clear on one point: Army of Two: The Devil’s Cartel works, at least as a machine. The game has as much personality as a roll of paper towels. In this game you press forward, shoot a gun at digital characters shooting guns at you, earning money each time you shoot off a leg to buy more guns and maybe a Skullcandy t-shirt to put on your character. It also exposes the gaping void in the video game industry’s heart.
#ARMY OF TWO ALPHA MOVIE#
It plays like a generic video game featured in the background of a movie that doesn’t have the budget to license a real game. Army of Two: The Devil’s Cartel is so empty, so devoid of meaning and merit, that it’s not even offensive -at least, its content isn’t offensive. So in 2013, when the novelty of co-op has washed away, what’s Army of Two’s role? In lieu of new co-op ideas, does The Devil’s Cartel have something important to say about the terrifying violence of the Mexican drug trade or about private military corporations? Is it some kind of all out action spectacle like Call of Duty, or maybe an attempt at comedy like Bulletstorm? What’s the point?
#ARMY OF TWO ALPHA SERIES#
Even horror series like Dead Space 3 have their own little armies of two or more. Even the idea of having one player need to boost another one up onto a ledge was novel before the game came out in 2008. There were games like Gears of War and Halo out in the world, but few that were actually built for two different characters who sometimes had different goals. When the first game was in production, cooperative games on consoles were still a rarity. Fitbit Versa 3ĮA Montreal developed the original Army of Two in a very different landscape than the one that birthed Army of Two: The Devil’s Cartel.