Army of Two: 40th Day Review

The level design does well to promote plenty of opportunities to use aggro for flanking purposes but the endless procession of the same five enemies fail to take advantage of game mechanics, requiring no significant variety in combat strategy beyond simply shooting enemies in the back. Occasionally parts of the environment can be pulled off for cover, offering some diversity in defensive options, but the combat still feels under-developed.

If you are lacking a buddy, marking your target before entering the room helps the CPU follow instructions well.

While a game so fundamentally co-op shouldn’t get bogged down in story, the plot in 40th Day is so insignificant it makes Doom seem complex. It seems that bad guy Jonah is willing to cause 9/11-levels of terrorist destruction to every high-rise in Shanghai in order to (please look away now if you don’t want to know the big reveal) force the same finale that Double Dragon did in arcades back in 1987. The game doesn’t even have the guts to follow through with its poorly conceived moral dilema, resulting in an unsatisfactory end, what ever your choice.

Following the attack and the zoo, the temple is far too generic a setting for a final level.

There’s no doubting that 40th Day plays to its strengths and offers an enjoyable, albeit incredibly brief, co-operative campaign. It’s visually hard to fault and drastically improves on the original, but it plays its hand in the first chapter and offers little beyond that. It’s certainly possible that the game’s four choices of versus multiplayer (unavailable at the time of review) will add considerable longevity to 40th Day, though with the majority of its unique features (aside from the gun customisation) designed to exploit computer AI, that remains doubtful. The potential is there for a third game to capitalise on the series’ positive features, but until that day, the 40th Day stands as a perfectly competent but ultimately disposable title.

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