Army of Tutu is touted as having a 'morality' system, more co-op interaction, more ways of dealing with situations, and a holy-cow awesome weapons modification system.
Unsurprisingly, none of these things are true.
The morality is worse than Bioware. You can either make obviously 'good or evil' decisions with nearly no ingame consequences (consequences are played out in a brief cutscene, but seldom have any affect on you beyond 'if you are good you get more stuff') or you can save hostages or not. The hostages could have been interesting, since you're macho mercenaries in slantyland and don't really care... except EVERY HOSTAGE WILL GIVE YOU THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS. It is thus not a 'morality' choice at all; it's in your interest to save every hostage even if you are 'mercenary'.
The co-op stuff is crippled by the poor level design. At set points the game will allow you do do various things (ie grab the cunningly facing the wrong way officer, surrender to the guys who conveniently don't shoot instantly like everyone else) which are actually pretty cool... but there's no way to 'choose' to do this. Either it's normal combat and it's impossible, or it's a setup situation where the flying unskippable camera will send massive hints at you to do the false surrender or whatever. In general you can 'mark' targets for your partner and he'll try to help what he thinks you're doing; but the AI is so terrible that he'll aim at the second guard over hostages, and when you shoot he'll... do nothing, the remaining guard will kill the hostages, and then he'll shoot where the guard used to be. When it works, though, it's much better than the old 'press co-op snipe' button.
The weapon customisation is a complete failure. It is at once less ridiculous than the first game (where you bolted progressively huger muzzle boosters on your guns) and less flexible than the first game. It includes more scopes and muzzle boosters/suppressors to help you work with role and aggro, but the changes are generally very slight. Some of the stat changes are very strange; changing an AK-47 to an extended mag cuts your 'handling' (ie reload speed) but then moving up to a dual-drum 100-round doesn't reduce it any further. There are 'hand made' parts, like beer-can silencers and screwdriver bayonets, and NO REASON TO EVER USE THEM. You can skin your guns, but sadly the 'pimped' skin isn't a crafted diamond-encrusted thing anymore, it's just a 'shiny gold/platinum' texture on everything. That said you can use bubbles or whatever on your guns now which looks absurd and enrages the enemy, which is neat. Ammo for 'special' (ie sniper) weapons is now massively reduced; 400 primary and 15 sniper is common. 'Secondary' (ie pistol) is not only pistols; tokarev, Glock 18 and Deagle only. Being able to put a G36 forearm on an AK47 with an M4 magazine and SCAR stock might interest some people, but it doesn't make much ingame difference.
The combat is similar to the first game; cover-based, high-lethality (at least on hard), regenerating health stuff. However, this time badguys only drop ammo pickups sometimes, but you can always pick up their gun as a 'temporary weapon' and use it instead. You can use the weapon merchant at any time (even in combat, as far as I can tell) but you can't buy ammo ever. The badguy types are similar to the first game (regulars, heavies, shields, etc) but it seems to have taken a Modern Warfare approach to setpiece battles.
I'm nearly finished the game, and almost no time has been spent establishing any story at all. This isn't a bad thing, but given that it's in Shanghai (totally obliterated in a series of cutscenes with no impact on the game) I expected more than 'walk down totally linear corridor for 4 levels then maybe we'll hint at the plot'. Your characters are mercenaries, but maybe once an hour you'll have some interaction with someone that establishes their intent or motivation; for the rest it's pure corridor-stroller land, but without the crazy levels from Army of Poo (like parasailing, attacking aircraft carriers, etc).
So in short, I want to know if anyone else has it because the terrible partner AI is pissing me off.
If he bursts into flames he breaks cover and runs over to hug/burn me to death. My gf hates it too much to play it. I think January might be the month of the sunk games, however.
