Cooperative play is crucial to EA Montreal's action shooter Army of Two. The studio's first HD-console release doesn't just encourage teamwork, it requires it. Underneath the near-comical cigar-chomping machismo and f-bombs lies a golden rule from elementary school: always use the buddy system. The game's finally done and will ship to stores in a few weeks, but prior to it hitting the production plants EA hosted us at its Redwood Shores facility to give us an idea of how multiplayer will function over Xbox Live and PlayStation Network.
Army of Two is a third-person shooter that will put you in the role of one of two bickering mercenaries for hire. Both are tough-as-nails and have a mean streak that runs from Tokyo to Tuscon. Throughout the various dirty jobs you'll do, you'll earn cash based on completing assignments and scoring kills, whether it's violence in a Middle Eastern locale or an assault on a Somali warlord in Mogadishu circa 1993. Fundamentally, it's a shooter with mechanics that are designed for easy pick-up-and-playability, from the fairly simple HUD to the optional GPS that always keeps you clued in to where you're supposed to go. It might not be a tactical military shooter for the Full Spectrum Warrior crowd, but it should entertain most shooter fans.
The aggro system is at the core of AoT's gameplay. One player, either by toting bigger and gaudier weapons or simply by shooting, gains aggro, or attention. Aggro is indicated onscreen both with a meter and a red hue that appears around the player. As enemy AI focuses on the aggro-gaining soldier, the other soldier takes on a more transparent look, and he'll be able to flank and attack distracted combatants. There are also ways to enhance both aggro and stealth through weapon enhancements.
The main event of our AoT demo, however, was to get hands-on with Versus mode. Online play runs through AoT's virtual veins, but we haven't really gotten a glimpse at the game's multiplayer beyond co-op missions. The combative side of the experience will pit two pairs of mercenaries against one another. Four versus maps ship with the game and span locales such as Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan. In keeping with AoT's mercenary plot, teams will compete for cash and win by any means necessary.
Many of the missions feel a bit like modes found in other shooters, but they've been fused together into a huge deadly mishmash. In a ten-minute round, you'll find yourself extracting hostages from a war-torn zone for a big payout, assassinating a target, or protecting a database. In extraction, one person can grab a hostage while the other draws aggro to divert attention away from the rescue effort. Besides human opposition, you'll also have to fight your way through AI terrorists to hit the extraction point and get cash. Army of Two spices things up by allowing you to camp out at an overlap point on the map and sabotage the other team, then go for the hostage yourself.
