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I've seen some pretty positive reviews around the internet, and Pulp made a Darksiders thread, so here I am keeping SDN updated.

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.

If you're so much of an achievement whore that you have to do co-op, I was planning on doing a 7-day "gamestop rental" of the game in a couple of weeks to see what it was like. However, like I said it won't be for a couple of weeks (still getting settled into a new semester) so if you're anxious to get it out of your house and back to EBgames, I can't help you.

Obviously, the fact that the two of us live in opposite time-zones would also hamper any cooperative effort.

EDIT: I did not mean achievement whore in a strictly negative sense, as I'm also fairly completionist myself. (although I can usually restrict myself to single-player shit)

Yeah, I don't think I'll be able to stop Cherry taking it back for very long. It'll probably be gone by Saturday. Thanks for the thought, though; the game is massively frustrating in single player.

Stark wrote:Yeah, I don't think I'll be able to stop Cherry taking it back for very long. It'll probably be gone by Saturday. Thanks for the thought, though; the game is massively frustrating in single player.

Is it? I think i'll give it a pass. I think i've still got the original in a box in the basement with other games that I never play. Definitely a mediocre game at it's best. Plus, I could never play the co-op with my friends sitting next to me 'cause the homo-erotic vibes made me uncomfortable (tell me you don't see it. Look me in the eyes and tell me you don't see it!)

Flash bought the first one for zero dollars and played it once. He flat out refuses to play it again.

If you think the first game is in the closet wait till you play Army of Tutu. It tracks your friendship (which is constantly decreasing apparantly) and amongst all the fratboy airguitar fistbumping positive interactions is the 'hump your partner' animation. If you do it enough you go from 'noncommital' to 'friends' to 'tight' to 'ambiguous'. Press the hump button from behind your partner to find out why!

I sat down and played through this last weekend. I thought it was alright, though I share many of the criticisms Stark has brought forth. The game could have benefited form some story work, but honestly the guys at EA Montreal (lets take an awesome concept and turn it into shit, thanks for the failure that was Kane and Lynch, fuckers!) would only fuck it up, in fact not having much of a story and putting you in the action is probably for the best.

I was disappointed with the weapon customization and would have like better options than just swapping m-16 and ak parts, although I felt the useless silencers and shiv bayonets were pretty cool. Thanks to their negligible cost in-game there was little for me to complain about.

The AI can be quite retarded at time as was pointed out.

I thought they improved the graphics a little bit for some stuff, but that they really dropped the ball on many of the backgrounds. Shanghai is most assuredly not the bland piece of shit represented in the game. That being said, the levels were neat to play in, but could have used some more rigorous playtesting.

IMHO this game isn't terrible and follows nicely in the footsteps of its predecessor, my beef with this is that army of two should have been released at shovelware prices (representative of it's actual quality), this also applies to the sequel. Hell, if they sold this game at a much reduced price and didn't try to hype it up as being better than it is, they'd probably sell more copies. As it stands, it is worth a rent and maybe a bargain bin purchase in a few years.

I really only mention the lack of a story due to the 'lol Gears has no story' thing; it's not necessary (and Ao2's story was near incoherent nonsense anyway). There's just something wrong when you get the 'save all hostages' achievement before the plot even starts.

Stark wrote:I really only mention the lack of a story due to the 'lol Gears has no story' thing; it's not necessary (and Ao2's story was near incoherent nonsense anyway). There's just something wrong when you get the 'save all hostages' achievement before the plot even starts.

You've got me thinking of the story (such as it is), and I kind of like how the game relies on you being there "in real time". The events of the game unfold around you and the collectible radios add a modicum of depth to the situation...the lack of exposition doesn't detract form anything in this instance IMHO. I got a "Cloverfield" vibe from the game, and yes this remark is totally cribbed from some interview that I read, but I think it works for the game.

I agree on the hostages, though I never really thought much about the achievment.
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