GamesRelay

Name: Army of Two: The 40th Day

Tyson Rios and Elliot Salem, collectively known as The Army of T.W.O. (Trans World Operations) return to the firing line for a new adventure in the Army of Two: The 40th Day. The first game wasn't particularly well received amongst most critics, although it certainly had its followers, developers EA Montreal for publishers and parent company Electronic Arts have sought to address some of these criticisms and have built The 40th Day from scratch. Their new outing takes place in Shanghai, a couple of days after their first jaunt ends. The city has been devastated by a terrorist attack and our heroes must find a way out. What should be a routine mission for them quickly turns bad and they end up in the wrong place at the wrong time.

This being the Army of Two, the gimmick is that there is always two of you in the battle; you can either team up with a friend in offline or online or you can just sit around online in the hope that someone else has nobody else to play with and you can just get together with a random stranger for some fun.

Just like its predecessor, The 40th Day is a third-person shooting affair with most of the action taking place in an urban environment, along your travels you'll fight your way through the streets of Shanghai and even the Shanghai Zoo as you battle to stay alive. Well, technically it's not quite just the pair of you versus the world, you've got a handler who goes by the name of Alice whom was originally an operative with the same private military corporation that Rios and Salem worked with in the original game.

The combat is still handled with a cover system and the gun fights you inevitably get yourself into can become quite frantic, so you're going to want to find something to hide behind for the most part, these can include anything you can think of, walls, vehicles, palettes and even dead animals in the zoo. You've got the choice of either popping your head up and trying to take out a couple of the bad guys with some well placed head shots, or you can blind fire and hope that your bullets somehow find their way to their intended targets. The cover you find is also destructible, sometimes, so you need to be clever when ducking down behind something, as a rule of thumb it's wise to find something sturdy as bullets can pass through things made of wood, however, even the concrete walls aren't going to protect you forever from a well aimed enemy RPG.

As The 40th Day begins you're instructed to meet your contact, you're weaponless and apparently have forgotten the basics of combat as you're instructed on the controls, it isn't a particularly long or complicated introduction though and before long you're reintroduced to your weaponry and the trade mark masks which the pair wear. The weaponry is all based on real life weapons, you start off with a basic machine gun, pistol and sniper rifle, but as you progress you'll learn how to purchase bigger and better variations of the guns and also be able to customise the weapons to your own tastes. You can mix and match the various parts of the guns you buy or find along the way and you can also give them a whole new look by 'pimping' your paint jobs.

The masks which the pair wear in battle on the other hand have a HUD which gives you important information about your environment and the dangers you face, it can even tell you where to go should you get lost. A novel feature is the ability to design your own mask which you can do from the Army of Two website, the next time you boot the game you'll be able to use it in both the offline campaign and in the online modes as well, the only limit being your imagination. These online tools for designing your mask are pretty easy to use and you can knock something up in a couple of minutes even if you don't have any previous experience.

Shortly into your adventure you'll start learning the new stuff (or more stuff depending on your perspective), this is where you have to make your first choice, should you shoot your contact due to an order dictated to you, or should you should let him go. You've not much information to go on so it's more of a moral choice which you've to decide upon based on what little information you have to hand; once your choice is made then you're given a brief but meaningful insight into your actions which is told via a short interlude in the story and plays out in a comic book type style. It's worth a note to say that these are actually pretty well done, considering there is no speech or subtitles to accompany these sections, you know exactly what is going on just from the way the panels are drawn and the expressions that are on the characters faces.