Army of Two is one of those franchises that when you heard announced was almost an eye-roller. It felt like the game was built upon a single idea pushed out of a corporate meeting but no one could claim the first title, released in 2008, was a bad game. It got decent reviews and EA Montreal did a good job on capitalizing on the promise of the franchise. Two years later, EA Montreal made the follow-up to the first title called Army of Two: The 40th Day and improved almost every aspect of the game. While it wasn’t gaming perfection, it was a highly entertaining and very solid gaming experience. Now over three years later, Visceral Montreal has delivered Army of Two: The Devil’s Cartel. The first two titles in this series have struggled to break out of B-tier status, can The Devil’s Cartel elevate to the next letter grade?
The story follows Alpha and Bravo, a new two-man team at Trans World Operations (TWO). This is the first game in the series to follow a different team other than Salem and Rios but they are still around for the story. The game starts out with a prologue section that has you working a hostage extraction mission with the original TWO team but things go soar near the end and something happens. For the meat of the game, your two-man team and several others from TWO are running security for a politician named Cordova in Mexico. Obviously, things go sour quickly, when a cartel named La Guadaña ambush the convoy you’re in and you have to rescue him while having to deal with a Black Hawk Down situation where enemies are coming from all over to take you down. It’s an alright set up and the events during the prologue come around to have meaning on the present actions but ultimately the story is forgettable. Most of the morazlity choices have been stripped away from the game. The new team of Alpha and Bravo just do not click as well as the old team, making the buddy cop aspect fall flat. Overall the story serves its purpose to give action for the gameplay but it won’t have the impact that the prior games had.
If you have played Army of Two before, the basics are largely unchanged. The game is a 3rd person shooter where you and a partner take down enemies and navigate through linear levels. Sometimes through the level, you’ll have the option to split up and send a friend to a different area than yourself. This leads to some cool scenarios and interesting tactics. Unfortunately the aggro system is kicked far into the background. Before, you would start glowing red or blue to indicate how the enemies were treating you. This allowed for the partner not taking heat to sneak around and flank. Now, that system is sort of still there, but the indicators are gone and almost all the scenarios do not require any special tactics. The enemies that required you to flank around and take them out from behind, are also largely gone. There are some special enemy types, but they rarely require anything more than a torrent of bullets if you don’t care to try to hit their weak points. While this make the game easier than before, it almost makes it more generic. The new additions in level design such frequent arena style combat zones don’t help the repetitious nature of the gameplay much either. These parts highlight some of the ease in the game, where you can easily run around without using cover and take everyone down. The arenas are small enough that you’ll see the handful of spots that they are running in at and take out tons of guys in an unending melee frenzy. On top of this, there is Overkill mode and this make you and your partner invincible for a short period. It does make you feel like a badass at times but it almost negates a lot of the strategy the game seems to want you to use. And one of the more apparent additions is a status screen at the end of every section. I said every section, not level. This means that almost every 5 minutes, the game will pause and take you out of the experience to tell you how you did as well as offer you the option to change weapons or your characters visual look. In prior games, you just had the option whenever out of combat and worked quite well. The weapon system is largely unchanged from the prior games. You can go in, buy new weapons and upgrade them to suit your needs. Despite these negatives, the gameplay is not horrible. There is still some fun to be had here, it just pales in comparison to other games and even its own prior games. If you can find a cooperative partner and tone the difficulty up a little higher, this can be a solid experience. The changes in this game have been largely for the worse though.
The settings of Mexico are much more down to earth and more subdued than The 40th Day. The scope and scale of the set pieces are not as impressive. The Michael Bay spectacles are a little more subdued. Now the tradeoff for this exchange is that there are now pieces of the environment that are destructible. While this can be quite cool, both visually as well as for gameplay, it’s not quite enough. The level design is quite basic and the moments where you split up are not as frequent as one would prefer. The artistic design is also quite bland. The city of Shanghai was awesome and the locales you visited were unique and the well done. The one that sticks out in my mind is the zoo from that game. There are no moments in this game like that. There are some parts that are better done than others and there a few parts that feel impressive but overly done setting of stereotypical Mexico doesn’t do it any favors for being unique. The character models are as good as before, looking very crisp and high detailed. The weapons are great looking, a little ridiculous once you pay for a shield to be attached to them, but good looking nonetheless. The game has definitely taken a step or two back in the graphics department and has not progressed with its other kin in the industry. It should be commended that the game looks clean and crisp and the level destruction is nice but the bland areas with the scale back in scope and set pieces are disappointing.
The sound design is almost as bland as the art style unfortunately. There are some almost cringe worthy lines delivered where the game references that it’s a game. If the game was a little more lighthearted, it might have been pulled off but since its tone is skewed more serious than this, it just comes off incredibly cheesy. Despite this, that is just the lines they have to say and the talent behind giving them life is decent. The biggest issue though is that it feels like the actors for Alpha and Bravo recorded their lines in separate rooms away from each other. The comradery that existed between the original team had just isn’t here. But on the plus side, the chatter of the enemies and even your teammates is decently done. Sure the buddy cop movie persona isn’t pulled off, it does provide the illusion that you aren’t alone and that they are coordinating against you. The one interesting option for sound is called Night Mode. This is the first time I have ever seen it in a game and it largely lessens the noises from louder events within the game, hopefully allowing your neighbors and others in your house to sleep a little more soundly. I personally would recommend headphones but if you don’t have a nice pair, it might be worth trying this out to keep your gaming quieter during the dark hours. The sounds of warfare in the environments is well done too if lacking a bit of a punch. The music is the part that most vividly exemplifies the rest of the design, it’s just bland and lacking in anything special. The music and the rest of the sound design do a fair job of doing their part for the game as a whole but it’s quite forgettable.
After the highly entertaining second game, it’s disappointing to see how the third installment of Army of Two played out. The prior game was like the movie Bad Boys in videogame form. Army of Two: The Devil’s Cartel feels like the heart and soul was just ripped out of the franchise. The two new protagonists don’t have the same chemistry as Salem and Rios. The story isn’t nearly as entertaining and the first half of the game plays out like a mobile game. Moving from arena with waves of spawning enemies, get rated, and then move onto the next arena to get swamped by the next several waves of guys. While this type of gameplay is not unknown with a lot of first-person shooters these days, The Devil’s Cartel definitely pushes it to the limit. The gameplay does pick up though and is more entertaining throughout the second half but when the storyline only lasts about six hours, it’s almost over by the time it hits its stride. Replayability is further neutered by the removal of morality choices so while the cooperative stuff works well, it’s just not as good as its older brother. The graphics are quite decent in the game, highlighted by destructible environments, but are artistically bland. There will be some parts that will be visually interesting but they are far and few between. The sound is well done and it must be commended for inclusion of a night mode, a first from what I have seen, but overall is just as bland as the visual design. Overall, the highlight of Army of Two: The Devil’s Cartel is really the cooperative mode. If you and another person love cooperative games, this one might be a blip on your radar and be worth checking out but when the prior game in the series outclasses almost everything this one has to offer, it’s simply disappointing. Army of Two: The 40th Day isn’t the pinnacle of gaming perfection, but it truly delivers a solid Bad Boys experience. Then, after you’ve played that game and the first in the series and you want more new content, then possibly think about getting this game.
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