So I spent an hour or so with EA's new co-op-focused shooter, Army of Two. So far, it's making a pretty good impression. The key to the third-person shooter's gameplay is the old MMORPG concept of aggro. You're always working with a partner, and the game slaps a fat aggro meter right on the screen. When you're shooting, killing, or doing other high-profile things, the meter swings your way. When your teammate starts bringing the ruckus, it moves his way. Enemies aim at whoever has the most aggro, which boils the game's strategy down to a few steps...
1) Tell your teammate to hide behind something and start causing a scene.
2) Wait for all the enemies to start looking his way.
3) Run around to the side or back of said enemies and shoot them in their stupid heads.
Not the deepest game in the world, so far. I'll be interested to see if that basic tactic is how the whole game works, or if things change later on. Either way, it's been cool so far.
The weapons and, more importantly, the weapon upgrades also seem very cool. Being a mercenary-type, you earn cash every time you complete an objective. You can spend that money at various spots throughout a mission to buy or upgrade your weapons. The upgrade system goes deeper than most, letting you put on longer barrels for more damaging shots, sturdier stocks for more accuracy, grenade launchers for some additional firepower, or even silencers to reduce the amount of aggro you gain by firing your gun. Lastly, you can purchase a "pimped" version of your gun, which makes it all gaudy by covering it with gold and diamonds. It's silly, and the "pimped" term is kind of played out at this point, but since it actually makes you draw more aggro when you run around with a diamond-encrusted gun, it's sort of funny that it's in there.
Content-wise, the game is sort of heavy. I don't think I've played a game that had a pre-rendered version of the World Trade Center on fire before, and considering how touchy that subject still is for many people, I never thought I'd see that in a game. But yeah, it's in there in the form of a news broadcast near the beginning of the game. It's effective, and considering the game immediately sends you into Afghanistan and, later, Iraq, it makes total sense. It doesn't feel like the developers are riding world events for shock value. Though if it ends with a fist fight against Osama, like Fugitive Hunter: War on Terror did, I'm going to demand my money back. Or laud it as the greatest game ever made, I can't really tell yet.
Early word, though, is that the game is short and the multiplayer mode doesn't hold up. So it'll be interesting to see how it plays out from here and if the rest of the game can keep me entertained as well as its first couple of missions have. We'll have a full-on review in the days ahead.