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Games: So the wife and I just finished Army of Two today, playing the entire thing co-op from start to finish, just as the developers intended.

My impression? Severe underwhelmation.

Looks way cooler than it is.

Level design was unmemorable, and most of the action was the same sort of ‘ hordes of enemies materialize from out of nowhere’ stuff that stopped being interesting years ago. Even worse, there were a ridiculous number of bulletproof gun turrets and bulletproof soldiers, both requiring one player to distract them while the other sneaks up from behind to deliver damage. Not only did this kind of stuff reek of ‘videogamey-ness’, it was just totally uninspired and repeated far too often.

Which one of us is Salem and which one is Rios again?

The story and characters were a joke, too… I seriously couldn’t remember who was who and what was going on thanks to the extremely poor choice of delivering most storytelling and information through audio chatter in the middle of heated firefights when the player is completely occupied doing something else. By the time we finished the game, I couldn’t even remember what my own character’s name was… the whole thing felt very generic and phoned-in.

There were tons of other little problems like certain areas of the game glitching up and requiring a restart, or how the characters have no believable sense of maneuverability in the environment… it’s another game where you can only climb up things that the developers want you to climb up, and you’re not allowed to hop down a three-foot ledge unless it’s the right three-foot ledge.

The best thing about Army of Two was that the characters looked like the Jason twins from Friday the 13th, and being able to play co-op is always a plus in my book… besides those perks, there’s really nothing exceptional or interesting about the game.