Reviewed: January 26, 2010
Reviewed by: Mark Smith

Publisher
Electronic Arts

Developer
EA Montreal

Released: January 12, 2010
Genre: Action
Players: 1-2

7
7
8
7
7.1

Supported Features:

The 40th Day just rubbed me the wrong way from the beginning and didn’t stop annoying me until the end. It all starts with a rather unimpressive overall design that abandons the “bigger and better” rule of sequels. Unlike the first game that took us all over the world and spanned a great deal of time, this game covers around 48 hours of terrorist activity in the city of Shanghai, and with the exception of the zoo level, things are pretty boring and repetitive, both indoors and out.

In true non-linear storytelling fashion the game opens with the destruction of Shanghai before we flash back to meet up with Salem and Rios, mercenaries for hire who have just arrived in town for their latest contract. Little do they know they are being setup by the enemy who is about to launch the attack on Shanghai, and once their services are no longer required, they will be terminated…with extreme prejudice.

Those who played the first Army of Two will know what’s in store, and it is also those same players who will also be the most disappointed. Lacking are all the cool companion moments of the first game. There are only 2-3 back-to-back sequences in the game, no vehicles, and no co-op sniping moments. The manual states that co-op moments are “automatic” but they seldom, if ever work, the way you want. Even the shooting while injured and being dragged doesn’t work because the camera zooms in low and close so my partner is obscuring my view of the guy shooting me.

The new gimmick for The 40th Day is the GPS heads-up display for your mask. This visor allows you to paint targets as well as showing the path to your next target or exit – very useful since the levels are a mess and not entirely obvious. My big complaints with the visor are the timer where the battery quickly runs down and the HUD snaps off, usually in mid-combat when you need it most, and the fact that your AI partner will never use it to paint your targets. The tactics are all on you.

Then you have the Morality factor that rates your actions from the smallest events to the biggest. Do you capture and tie down a terrorist or do you pop two in the skull. Those are minor adjustments but they do stack up and your overall morality can either pay off or penalize you during the game – most significantly, when you reach the hospital level. Major Morality moments actually play out with cutscenes showing the ramifications of your good or bad decision. Do you kill the endangered tiger to get a weapon or let him live? Do you encourage the young boy to fetch you a sniper rifle from a deadly crossfire zone or tell him to stay down?

What’s most disturbing is that the resulting cutscenes clearly indicate that no matter what your intentions, somebody is going to get screwed. I can only recommend that if you play the game that you decide early to make all good or all bad choices so you can at least get some Achievements. There is also a camaraderie element in play where you get boosts by acting in unison. I never saw any real use for the system other than going up close and hitting the positive or negative gesture button or triggering a Rock, Paper, Scissors mini-game.

In an attempt to give the illusion of greater content the designers have added a plethora of unnecessary content. You can now spend hours in the weapons store that magically follows you around the entire game allowing you to switch out or upgrade weapons, even in mid-battle as long as you aren’t in direct combat. How easy is it when the big armored shotgun soldier starts lumbering toward me and I can pop into the store and equip an RPG to bring him down?

You have primary and secondary weapons but the secondary slot is home to only one of three variations of pistol. Lame. Why no SMG? There is also a special slot that you can use for an RPG or more likely a sniper rifle. And during gameplay you can also pick-up a “temp” weapon that you can use until you equip one of your normal guns. Each weapon can be customized to the point of obsession from stocks and grips to scopes and ammo clips. You can paint your weapons all sorts of camo colors but why paint forest green or arctic white when you are in a ruined city the entire game? The modifications that do matter all factor in to the various stat bars on the side that show precision, handling, damage, etc.

You’ll need lots of money to buy weapons and upgrades, money that you’ll earn by completing objectives and from random cash drops of dead terrorists. The game almost becomes arcade-like after a battle as you run around picking up the glowing icons of cash and ammo. Ammo is classified as primary and secondary and is not weapon specific so Salem and Rios almost never run out of ammo. There are also some supply crates scattered about the game. These are full of cash and ammo but you have to stealth kill or trick the guards into submission or they will lock the crate forever. These crates along with several “save the civilian” moments present the few co-op moments in the game where you can either try to simultaneous snipe the enemies, grab and take their leader hostage, or fake a surrender to take them off guard then shoot them in a surprise slow-motion event.

The Aggro system is back and hasn’t changed much. The person doing the shooting draws all the enemy attention while the other sneaks up and flanks them. It works really well with both human and AI partners. The command cross for single player allows you to order your partner to stay, advance, or regroup in both an aggressive (Aggro seeking), or passive mode. You can also trigger a PiP camera so you can look through your partner’s visor.

Controls are really bad if not downright broken; a side effect of having too many functions and not enough buttons. The A button is used for nearly everything from Use to Roll to Grab and Drag to Sprint and even Heal. So imagine my partner goes down and calls for help. I run up to him and press A to grab him but the game hasn’t prompted me to grab him yet so instead I dash forward, leap a piece of cover right into the middle of the enemy and die.

Speaking of cover, the whole cover system is completely broken. The game tries desperately to be like Gears of War but every possible decision has to be made manually. Your guys will snap to cover automatically just by running into it, but if it's low cover you must manually crouch first or it won’t snap to cover. You also have independent control over shooting left or right handed, but if you aren’t using the right shoulder view when you go to corner cover it simply breaks you out of the cover entirely. So you must manually crouch/stand as well as figure out which shoulder to fire from in each and every cover-combat moment.

Army of Two is a cooperative game by design, which is why I dove right in to the co-op experience from the beginning, but the local split-screen mode is broke if for no other reason than the mandatory side-by-side split-screen. Sure it might seem logical since “everyone” has widescreen TV’s these days, but I think Modern Warfare 2 SpecOps clearly proved that a top-bottom split works much better in combat situations where peripheral awareness is paramount. If you plan on playing The 40th Day cooperatively make sure you do it online or not at all.

The AI for solo play is pretty good although I did have my partner break my orders a few times, usually resulting in his death or at least going down and then crying for my help. I also see the same issue I had with the first game – my partner dragging me into open fire then trying to heal me – was still present. I did enjoy the ability to order my partner around with the LB button. You can have him do just about anything you would have to do yourself.

It’s pretty hard to die in Army of Two as long as you work as a team and are close enough to keep each other healed. Unless you both go down at the same time or an enemy actually snaps your neck or a grenade goes off you can usually get healed if your partner can reach you in time, and you can always try to meet him halfway or at least crawl to cover while he’s coming. But if you should die you will likely fall victim to a really bad checkpoint system that not only has you playing pretty large portions of the level over again, it also forces you to watch unskippable cutscenes. Even worse, any shopping or upgrades you may have done don’t actually save until a checkpoint. I literally had 30 minutes of shopping and upgrades all get undone when I resume the game and died a few rooms later. The game says it’s “saving” when you leave the store but its not.

The 40th Day looks pretty good for a game that takes place in a solitary city. The whole pallet is a bit hyper-stylized, almost like a graphic novel come to life, but the level of texture detail on the guys is amazing and some of the environments border on photo-realistic, especially when you are down in the slums or at the zoo. The cutscenes are extremely exciting, like a moment from Armageddon, only its missiles instead of meteors. Buildings sinking into smoke or toppling over into others are epic set pieces. Technically, there is some texture pop-up, even indoors, and the colors are overly saturated. In-game cutscenes are pre-rendered as I learned when I started my second game with a new armor choice but the cutscene showed me in my tanktop.

The audio package is the strongest element in this sequel with fantastic sound effects of gunfire and explosions to the entire city of Shanghai coming down around you. The voice acting is excellent for both our main characters and all the supporting cast. Salem has the best one-liners of recent memory while Rios is the gruff straight man in nearly every situation.

The 40th Day is pretty short, clocking in at around 8 hours for the seven-chapter story. The Achievements range from incredibly easy to having to play the game through at least two or three times to earn them all. The one thing I found interesting is that your weapons and cash earnings are saved per profile and not per game, so I was acquiring huge amounts of cash by playing my multiplayer coop game in slot one and my solo game in slot two. Money and weapons I had earned in my initial game were all available to me when I started a new solo game.

Multiplayer gets a bit more attention in the sequel with four new game modes. There is Co-op Deathmatch that pits teams of two against each other. Control is the CTF mode where you capture and hold a point on the map to earn points. Warzone has you racing around the maps completing various objectives and Extraction is the 4-player-only mode that has you fighting off wave after wave of enemies in increasing number and difficulty. Regardless of the mode or the number of players, you are always linked to a partner, and only your partner can revive you when you fall in battle.

I really disliked The 40th Day after my initial play of the first four chapters, but when I restarted the game and started playing solo it got much better, and not because my human partner sucked, but solely because of the decision for side-by-side split-screen. I will only play online with a human from now on or play alone and deal with the limitations of the AI.

Sadly, none of the improvements actually improved the game. The GPS was a joke and I seldom remembered to even use it. The co-op moments were all but gone in the solo game, but at least I got to do the 3-2-1 countdown with a human partner. The Aggro system works just as well as it did in the first game, but I still question the realism of walking right up to some guy who is “so focused” on my partner as to not see a big scary dude in a skull face hockey mask coming at him. I miss vehicles and I miss the variety of locations as one burned out broken building and one crumbling street started blending in with the last. Morality and camaraderie were interesting concepts but never fully fleshed out.

At the end of the day…the 40th Day, Army of Two offers enough fun and action and cinematic set pieces to earn a solid recommendation as a rental. I’ve seen the game selling for $40 already so I’d even encourage a purchase at that price. The more people that have it, the easier it will be to engage in online co-op because the local co-op isn’t worth your time. It’s a game that will test your patience and tolerance of mediocre game design and poor controls as much as your skills of action-shooters.