DOS army is back! A well-orchestrated series of mysterious disasters Shanghai drags on the brink of ruin, and now Army of Two has to make his way through the devastated neighborhoods of the city to try to overcome the difficulties and uncover the secret of forty days.
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Amazon.com Product Description
| Army of Two: The 40th Day is a third-person shooter based in groundbreaking cooperative gameplay functionality. Sequel to the 2008 game of the same name, and featuring series heroes, Rios and Salem, in this new iteration players have a bigger playbook of features and a new arsenal of co-op moves that either player can perform at any time, opening up fresh strategies in the face of overwhelming odds. In addition, the game features advanced weapon customization and upgrade systems, as well as four explosive online multiplayer modes, each focused on unique cooperative play.
Set a few years after the events of the original Army of Two game, Army of Two: The 40th Day features the continuing adventures of millitary contractors Tyson Rios and Elliot Salem. With the help of Alice Murray, their mission coordinator, they now run their own paramilitary business, known as TransWorld Operations (TWO). Working what seems to be a routine mission in Shanghai they find themselves surrounded by a force of competing private military contractors intent on running amok in the city. Will Rios and Salem survive? Will they be able to make a few bucks off a bad situation? All they have is each other to rely on. Gameplay Multiplayer Modes Weapons Customization Army of Two: The 40th Day features the most advanced weapons customization ever seen in a video game. Using money earned in-game for your contracting duties you can adapt your arsenal and firepower to fit the obstacles you face. With malleable attributes like handling, accuracy, ammunition capacity, and power, coupled with a huge variety of parts and the ability to make customizations at any time in the game, the possibilities and impact you can make through customization are virtually limitless. Key Game Features |
Customer Reviews
Underwhelming game + a horrible marketing gimmick
I must admit I was quite excited for The 40th Day. I enjoyed the previous installment in the series and had fairly high expectations for the second. So I sat down and put the game in and waited to be wowed. And then I waited. And waited. And waited some more. And then the credits rolled.
The 40th Day isn't an awful game but all the things that made the first game memorable like the co-op mechanisms, the tongue in cheek bromance, the ambiguous morality and the hard fighting brutality were completely underdeveloped here. The strength of a sequel over a new title is that a dev team can take all the popular aspects of a previous game and with that previous experience up the ante and redeliver a superior product based on those known strengths and weaknesses. Instead with the 40th Day you get exactly the same thing as before with an even thinner story (which I didn't thing possible) and a less engaging aesthetic. There is basically nothing here that makes me believe that a single lesson was learned from the previous title.
The controls are wonky but not intrusively bad. I did have an unexplainable bug where after I came back from turning off the game the Y-axis reset to un-inverted and I couldn't change it back. So if you're a freak of nature like me and play with an inverted Y-Axis be on your guard. The bug might make this game unplayable.
Also be warned: if you're looking for single player play time then don't put down your money on buying this game. I finished this game in less than six hours on Hard. There are a few unlockables but nothing to make it worth really playing through the campaign again. My recommendation would be to rent it and based off how much you enjoy the multi-player consider buying a copy then.
As far as the actual game play is concerned I was never once really engaged. The enemies have a very limited number of very jerky animations and their AI is unsatisfying. Like many poorly designed games that place an emphasis on the use of cover you'll often find yourself feeling like you're playing a game of wack-a-mole where you sit behind your cover and they sit behind theirs as you wait for them to lean out to ineffectually spray bullets at you. The enemies are not challenging and most of the episodes were you find yourself being challenged is when due to the design of the spawn points and the poor camera angles a half dozen opponents appear behind you. They're mostly carbon copies of each other, some with helmets and some with body armor but it's all the same deal. This is mixed up by having the occasional mini-boss which is decked out in heavy armor and has a special weapon like a Gatling gun or a grenade launcher. Between the combat cover mechanic and the cheesy pseudo-anime looking enemies I felt like I had traveled back in time fifteen years and was playing Time Crisis at the arcade again and not in a good way.
This is all interrupted by situations where you can take hostages and/or rescue civilians. While that sounds fun, and it is at first, it wears off about an hour into the game due to the fact that it's the same situation every time and you're never presented with a reason or a reward that makes you care. This brings me to the "moral choices" in the game. One of the great ideas in the game that had simply terrible execution the moral choices have almost no affect on the storyline or the game play. There are some items and weapon parts you can get one way as opposed to the other but they're not really a big deal and don't much alter the way you play the game or the manner in which it is or isn't enjoyed. You could be totally good or totally bad without significant alteration in the basic experience.
The second incredibly disappointing aspect of the game was the weapon modification. This is another idea that just never really seemed to get off the ground which is bizarre considering the attention and marketing it got as a component of the game. While you can change out barrels and add new sights or stocks, etc there is very little substantial difference in the weapon platforms. Once you buy one modification or the other it makes little difference what your "base" weapon is. Also the modifications themselves are limited and uninspired. With all the focus placed on attaining money in the game you'll find little reason to actually spend it as none of the mods have a real "fun" factor to them and their effect on your game play is minimal.
The multi-player is adequate but I don't see any shooter fan who owns a copy of Modern Warfare 2 spending enough time play The 40th Day to justify a purchase. You'll also notice that since you didn't pre-order a copy you don't yet have access to the Extraction feature of the game for a month. Note to EA: put a $10 mail in rebate or a poster or the such in your pre-orderers boxes. Leaving out an entire portion of your game for one of the most critical time periods for the sale of your product is incredibly stupid. Basically what EA has done is create the illusion of pre-orderers getting "extra material" by taking it away from everyone else. What a clever way to screw over your customers. Fire the guy that came up with that.
Bottomline: The game is a decent but not impressive 6 hours duck and shoot exercise. Unless you simply loved the multi-player portion of the first game I wouldn't recommend paying retail for this one. A rental isn't out of the question for a lazy weekend but with Bioshock 2, Mass Effect 2 and Modern Warfare 2, all vastly superior sequels, out or soon to be I'm not sure I'd argue you'll have more fun with this in your 360.
Pros:
*Good looking graphics, nice textures.
*Not too hard, not too easy.
*Curb stomping.
Subjective qualities:
*Simple combat mechanics.
*Check point save system.
*Not overly tactical, very shoot 'em up.
Cons:
*Terrible story.
*Very short.
*Undeveloped core concepts (weapon mods and moral choices).
*Painfully cliche aesthetics.
*Simple AI.
*Goofy Achievements.
*Little variation in play.
*Wonky Controls.
*You don't get the whole game you pay for on release (Extraction).
2 steps forward, 1 large step back
my opinion is definitly a little slanted because I LOVED the first army of two. and i overall really enjoyed this one. it's alot of fun and the shooter mechanics and general third person interface work really well. they're not spectacular but they are functional, not flashy but good. however in making the sequal here it seems a little design by comitee comenced and the things that made me love the first AOT were determined to be the reason for the mediocre reaction to it. apparently in the era of gears of war and halo AOT of all things was deemed "too meathead" in it's humor and the characters were blasted as over macho idiots. i loved the humor and the characters. so the humor was toned down, Rios and salem are alot more subdued now and they really don't seem to enjoy their work like in the first one. seems to me if your gonna be a mercenary you might as well like doing it. and because it is the flavor of the month they added morality choices, i'm guessing to give depth to rios and salem. the moral choices are kind of interesting and give you some options as what jobs you want to accept but the choices tend to be rather crap.
The "new" humor i have to admit is not a step forward, the game is still funny but one stage is set in a zoo where all the animals have been murdered. it's suposed to set the tone and make you dislike the leader of the 40th day initiative as a maniac. but to me it's just morbid and the morality choice of killing a tiger to get the gun from his pen is really not cool. you can just buy the gun anyway so its not like you have to kill the tiger ever for completion purposes but honestly it's just kinda unnesisary.
for a co-op game the co-op has been toned down alot. i liked that AOT was all about two people, lots of step jumps and back to back moments and situations where you HAD to rely on your partner. in this game they took out the co-op snipe feature, not a big deal when playing with two people but it's just symptomatic of the design changes. there are two back-to-back moments in the whole game, and while one is totally awsome the other is just basic. i wasn't the biggest fan of the back-to-back mode in AOT but mostly because you had no control over it. if they made it so you could back-to-back under the right circumstances anytime. it'd be a great feature. also there are like 5 step jumps in the game and only 1 of them enables you to kill enemies while being held aloft to make it easier when you advance. the most glaring omission in the sequel is the really awsome rescue mechanics. in AOT you had to rescue injured npcs from time to time by slinging them over your shoulder and having your partner gun down enemies clearing a path for you since you could only use a pistol like this. it got annoying at times but that was the idea. and it was far and away better than any other escort mechanics i'd ever seen in a game. instead we have the equivalant of "puzzles" in the form of civilian rescues where you have to reach a highly ranked enemy and take him hostage to disarm the other soldiers. i do like this new feature it's pretty cool but with the ecception of one or two they're pretty straightforward.
now for the good
Rios's new voice actor is pretty bad ass, gives a real body to how he sounds, since he's a big guy it's a good thing. salems new voice actor is a pretty good guy, but not one i woulda chose for salem. the interactions between the two affects the dialoge and if you really piss each other off they more or less decide to go their seperate ways after they escape china. the supporting characters are good in this one, this game coulda used alot more alice murray in it but she is in it enough to make me happy. the new supporting characters are pretty good too, the crazy russian while not nearly as much fun as clyde is a nice addition to the cast list.
the weapon customisation is alot better in this one. once you buy a gun you get all the peices of it to use on any other gun that is similar enough to use it. i have the clip from an ak-47 jammed into an m4 with the barrel from another gun on the end of that. the customisable guns really affect the gameplay. in AOT my friend and i were so agressive the agro meter teetered back and forth and neither of us benefitted from it. in this game by putting silencers and the proper paint jobs on my guns, i build almost no agro and my friend goes in guns blazing with shotguns and hand cannons and i get to pick off guys left and right with my scoped assault rifle or even just run around busting heads with melee attacks. and the melee attacks are just wonderful, with or without the bayonette attachments you really put people in a hurt locker
overall the game has been improved, but i miss the old salem charm and while i enjoyed the story overall, it's the kind of story you'd find in a spin off. the first game was all about completeing paid jobs but since you worked at a company you had no choice over the jobs but you went around the world doing some great stuff. now you have your own company, you get to choose the jobs, you can go anywhere. so they chose to lock the second game with a short job and a long trek home. i really want them to do a true mercenaryish game where you get to choose from a long list of jobs and complete them in whatever order you decide or even in a preset order but have them be actual mercenary work. this is a story of two mercenary bad asses caught in a bad situation not two mercenaries doing their jobs. which is fine, but like i said, would make a nice sidestory.
i can't recomend or not recomend this game because it's got a very specific audience and i just happen to be a part of it. so the best advice i can give you is to rent it and try it for yourself, it's not as bad as people say it is but it's not as good as i say it is either.
Army of Two: The 40th Day - Review
The "Army of Two" series could be best describe as the perfect "frat boy" shooter. Everything about the series is absolutely over the top ridiculous, but let's all be honest that's also 90% of the reason many of us have played the two titles. (the other 8% is of course co-op and then 2% because they have nothing else to play) The problem with "Army of Two: The 40th Day" is that EA decided to try to make the game a more serious affair and left the Bromace/Comedy/Action on the sidelines in this installment, which in my opinion put this game on the same level as many other generic military shooters.
Graphically I feel this version took a step forward in character design, animation and art. One of my favorite moments in The 40th Day is a scene where you are making your way to a mall and a heavily oppressed enemy zone in which most everything is shades of gray while red propaganda pours from the sky from airplanes over the city. Salem and Rios are in top form and have both received a boost in the graphic department. The moral choice cutscene's play out very well and even though I felt they did not belong in this game, the art in the comic compliments the game very well.
I have always enjoyed the Army of Two series as a co-op story experience, of course others do it better (Gears of War) but nothing like having your best friend as the other guys sharing a cold one and yelling at each other for not taking the proper cover as your dragging his ass back from being mowed down by a stationary gun. Great moments (I have actually had a "stressed" friendship when my real life friend couldn't comprehend "safe cover" is both games) but those moments are lost in The 40th Day due to the nature of the story, it's no longer a story of revenge and betrayal but a story of survival and cowardice as your only mission while the city is being blow to bits is to get the hell out of dodge.
Few things annoy me more these days than pre-order bonus modes. Extraction mode should have been available to everyone from the start, because the online component of either Army of Two has been mediocre at best. I pre-ordered two copies of The 40th Day from amazon for me and my brother-in-law, only to find the only issued me one code for extraction. We decided he would use the code but as I played his account two things became obvious, 1) In a co-op mode like Gears of War's Horde, Modern Warfare 2's Spec Ops or Halo's Firefight you never want 75% of your games population to not have access to that mode for over a month as many will not be interested by then, and 2) If your going to have a modem like Gears of War's Horde, Modern Warfare 2's Spec Ops or Halo's Firefight then you need to at least make it as good as they did.
My biggest issue with this game is the serious nature of the story. I enjoyed the game and I am proud to say I love the series, but the one thing that set this series apart from many other modern shooters was the humor and over the top bro-love. Which for the most part was not even in The 40th Day. (I am convinced the bromance writer was absent during the production). Army of Two filled the gap between cheesy military shooters and serious military shooters very well, trying to put it in the serious side of shooters will do nothing but harm to the title as it in no way can compete with the the much stronger titles in this genre.
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