Army of Two: The 40th Day Hands-On Impressions

Shanghai is looking rather worse for the wear in Army of Two: The 40th Day. Panicked civilians scurry through the streets as buildings come toppling down seemingly at random. Fire and rubble collude to prevent your easy escape, and when they fail in their task, well-armed soldiers are there to pick up the slack. This is hardly an ideal destination for rest and relaxation, but EA Montreal continues to bring up the idea of removing stress from the player as one of its primary goals for this sequel. Putting you in the middle of a certified disaster zone can't possibly be the best way to achieve such a thing, right?

Well, for EA Montreal, it's not about what the disaster is. It's about how you get through it. With The 40th Day, the team is aiming to remove as many obstacles from the first game's control scheme as they can, while still adding the functionality to let you execute the same ideas you might otherwise talk about but never put into action. In terms of controls, one of the biggies is the newly automated cover system. One legacy that this sequel is carrying over from the original Army of Two is a heavy reliance on cover while engaged in firefights. This time around, all you need to do is be set in a crouch position and you'll automatically lean your shoulder against a wall. The difference between peering out the side of cover and dashing over to the next object is a matter of how hard you push the analog stick.

This system feels a bit looser than the black-or-white, in-or-out cover system used in most cover shooters, but we really like the subtlety and freedom of movement it offers. It also helps to minimize the amount of button-pressing you'll be doing in the heat of battle. Another way the devlopers tackled this issue is by mapping grenades and melee attacks to their own specific buttons. If you've ever played a game where you needed to toggle between gun and grenade or gun and knife with one button and then use them with another button, you'll come to appreciate that added simplicity.

Army of Two's dual protagonists, Salem and Rios, return to action in The 40th Day. Aside from a few tweaks to give them some more character--like the way they'll instinctively lift their masks in safe situations--the two have been given the tools to work as better team this time around. A big part of that is a feature called the co-op playbook, which is a special screen you can pull up to provide a bevy of information on your current surroundings. Say you're pinned down behind cover thanks to an enemy who refuses to die despite your best efforts. You can pull up the co-op playbook, tag that enemy a bright red, and when your teammate pulls up his playbook, that enemy will jump out from all the others onscreen to let him know which one specifically is causing you fits. He takes the guy out and you're free to continue moving forward.

That gives you the general idea of what EA Montreal is trying to deliver with the playbook--a way for players to take ideas they might throw back and forth over their Xbox or PlayStation headsets and give them tools to pull those ideas off in the game. But outside of the playbook, a few other tricks have been added to let you tackle enemies a bit more creatively. Our favorite was the mock surrender. With this technique, you can have one player lift his arms and walk into a group of enemies as if to say, "I give up! Please don't kill me." If you're lucky, they'll abide by your wishes and walk over to inspect you. Naturally, that's when your teammate drops them with a well-placed spray of bullets.

These control improvements go alongside a number of visual upgrades to make an overall package that seems quite promising. We were impressed by the way the game's frame rate handled the task of giant skyscrapers crumbling to pieces in the distant background, and how the AI handled one sequence where the players had to progress down a slanted surface that was actually a collapsed building teetering at an incline. It's clear the team in Montreal is aiming to include a lot of ambitious set pieces, and from what we've seen, the technology seems well equipped to handle them.

As if you couldn't tell, it looks like Army of Two: The 40th Day is one for shooter fans to keep an eye on. EA teased what it plans to show at the Electronic Entertainment Expo, telling us that this most recent demo was about the short-term action, while the next look at the game will deal more with player decisions and long-term consequences for things like killing civilians. We'll see what they mean by that in a few weeks.