From Syndicate to Conflict: Desert Storm to Gears of War, there has been a tendency for squad-based shooting games to settle on four as the optimal size of your team. It gives you options in terms of both strategy and narrative while remaining manageable, leaving you able to keep an eye on everyone at the same time. Plenty of other games in the world of military shooters, meanwhile, took the solo approach, the better to emphasise heroic deeds against all odds. And as online elements became increasingly important, all kinds of other combinations found their place too.
Army of Two is a thorough exploration of an option splitting those ones down the middle. Of course, co-operative 2-player goes way back in games too, even if Bubble Bobble and Double Dragon and Pang et al weren’t exactly the same genre. It was getting a resurgence due to the popularisation of online play meaning you didn’t need the two people to be in the room together. And indeed, as in the case of Army of Two, it was increasingly possible to have an AI-driven teammate do a passable job.
The result is, unsurprisingly, a synthesis of the Army-of-One and Army-of-Four genres, leaning a fair bit further into the heroic thrills but presenting a simplified version of strategy. Some heavily and unrealistically applied rules make it work. Essentially, if one of your two characters shoots at enemies, they focus on that character. Carry on doing so, and the focus increases (as indicated by a handy swingometer), to the exclusion of almost everything else. That obviously sets you up for sneaking around behind them, which is specifically required for some enemies, as indicated by colour-coded symbols above their head.
The simplified tactics are approached with a simple and effective way of conveying instructions to your team-mate, pressing different ways on the direction pad to tell them to hold or advance, and pressing the same way again for them to do so aggressively. The levels are also designed with the set up in mind, balancing tactical options with straightforwardly always showing you which way to go (if you get stuck you can press the back button on the controller and the screen will show you with glowing red/yellow arrows). I found reacting to changing circumstances and working out which of my quite equally matched pair to put forward at any given moment to be tactically engaging in a way which a lot of more technical games never quite managed.
As well as being engaging on a moment-to-moment action level, the set up should theoretically lend itself to something that says something interesting about a relationship between two characters. I say theoretically because Army of Two barely even tries. It takes its two mercenaries Rios and Salem through time, starting from a mission in Somalia in the ‘90s, after which they are told that they were unstoppable “like an ARMY OF TWO” (emphasis game’s own). From there they attend various other real-life warzones, but barely even reach an interesting level of banter, never mind any other kind of development. One of them gets increasingly convinced that things aren’t right with their company, the other tells them they’re being a conspiracy theorist; it’s a bit of a bargain bin X-Files thing that doesn’t amount to much even when the conspiracy inevitably does emerge.
I bring a bit of additional bias as a result of the game’s title here which I should explain. In 2001 my then-partner’s favourite band was Dum Dums, a kind of proto-Busted playing attractive pop-rock. They released a single called “Army of Two”, a #27 smash hit on the UK charts. “When the world is against you/I will protect you/Darling we’ll be an army of two” Dum Dums sang. Their song was a consistent ear-worm throughout my time playing its namesake. I wasn’t expecting any comparable romance (although, like, why not, it would be great!) but there is absolutely no spark of any kind. When the men parachute in spoon formation or collapse, bodies on top of each other, when hit, still nothing. Even the grotesquely hyper-masculine Gears of War managed more of a sense of human feeling.
Army of Two places its focus elsewhere, and that’s where things get worse still. What Salem and Rios do care about is money, saying that “we’re making bank because we’re at war now” and telling tales of $10k sports bets. The money isn’t just for their lifestyle, though, but for guns and equipment to buy up between and during missions. That includes a huge range of Punisher-ish masks, and also a set of upgrades for your assorted weapons based on their real-life equivalents. You can add protectors, increased capacity magazines, and other bits with stats shown in great detail vaguely reminiscent of upgrading your car in Gran Turismo. The fetishisation of guns and the private purchasing of materials to kill more people rapidly with them is skin-crawling. Oh, and you can “pimp” your guns to be gold-plated to attract more attention too.
As you make your way through shooting countless people in Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and China, something else becomes clear. Even by the standards of a frequently racist genre, Army of Two is virulently racist. “All this shit looks the same to me” say your duo of their latest posting. In Afghanistan, men in keffiyehs come running straight at you with their hands up. Shoot at their chests for “an explosive surprise”, advise the loading screen tips! Terrorist caricatures, what larks. Elsewhere there is a casual joke about Thai sex workers, and plenty of dehumanisation to go round.
The plot of the game does engage slightly more with the ethics of profit-making military contractors. Slightly. There are references to a new American law to convert more of the military to that mode, and scenery-chewing speeches saying things like “Some critics will call this profiteering… but I call it progress”. Salem and Rios express some discomfort at what they’re doing. Not the killing masses of people for cash (those people are America-hating foreigners and don’t really count anyway), but at not being supported and equipped properly.
It turns out that some of your colleagues have been selling info about the actual military’s positions to better their own standing by comparison. The game ends with everyone involved responsible either dead or having served time in prison. “Power corrupts”, the army of two agree. Then they set up their own company, Trans World Operations (the camera lingers on the acronym TWO to make sure you don’t miss out; it’s that kind of narrative). Two cash-hungry dudes using money from revenge-chasing arms dealers to fund their own killing company is not presented as ironic or in any way complex, but a happy triumph. In the world of Army of Two, the only possible problems with profit-driven military are when bad people are in charge of them, and can all be fixed by putting good people in charge of them. Some things don’t simplify as nicely as tactics.
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