While it's a bit lacking in some areas, The 40th Day is still a rather fun shooter to start the new year.

User Rating: 7 | Army of Two: The 40th Day X360
Shanghai. It's a rather pretty city and a nice place to get some work if you're a gun for hire. Just make sure you don't set up shop when a group made up of independent mercenaries that decided to join forces and invade Shanghai put their plan into action. Grab your ballistic face mask and let's paint our guns red in this review of Army of Two: The 40th Day.

The game starts off like any other game featuring a dynamic duo of mercenaries should. Tyson Rios and Elliot Salem arrive in Shanghai with a simple task. Plant a couple of beacons and help initiate the invasion of Shangai. After a quick introduction to the games new Morality system, Shangai is besieged by a large group of mercenaries known as The 40th Day Initiative. Rios and Salem quickly decide it's a good time to grab their buddy Alice and get the heck out of dodge. Unfortunately, there's not much to look for here in terms of story. Like most shooters including the first Army of Two, the story isn't much outside of giving players a reason to bounce around from one objective to the next. It also seems to be lacking a lot of the fun humor of the first game. That's not to say the humor isn't there of course. The game just does not go out of its way for the sake of the joke all the time. The morality choices don't offer much either until the very last morality choice which determines which one of the endings you'll see. Depending on what you choose to do, you'll get to see one of two scenes that display the consequences of you actions and play out like an interactive comic. They barely seem to affect gameplay at all outside of rewarding you with parts and guns.

While there may not be much in the story department, there's enough in the gameplay department to distract you from that flaw. By that, I mean there's enough gun customization to distract you. As you move throughout Shanghai, making morality choices, saving civilians, locating items and completing objectives for cash you'll unlock a plethora of guns and attachments to satisfy your hunger for customization. You can paint your guns in all kinds of different styles, use a wide variety of attachments like soda can silencers, bayonets and stick larger magazines on your hybrid beasts to keep the pressure on those nasty merc dudes. For a third person shooter however, the gun play is a tad bit weak. The aiming is a little clunky especially when in close quarters and the guns feel as weak as they sound. Unfortunately, while there's a lot of primary guns to choose from, there's only three secondary weapons and a few more special weapons. Those of you that don't have a save from the first game will also end up missing out on couple of the weapons. However, while they lack the feel and sound, they admittedly deliver the punch their stats promise and killing hordes of mercs is still so very satisfying.

The cover system has had a touch up here and there. It still functions the same but Salem and Rios and leap over and climb on top of objects as well as slide into cover. One big improvement though is the allied AI. Issuing commands to your squad mates is a whole lot easier since they now understand what you're telling them to do. They'll act aggressive when you want them to, take cover where ever possible and actually contribute to the kill count. Best of all though, they won't drag you around the map for twenty minutes while you're downed and in need of a pick me up. With the new GPA system in your masks, your partner will also tag and call out enemy positions. This is a rather useful game mechanic as players can see tagged enemies through cover, differentiate between hostile opponents and civilians and find snipers and RPG's amongst the crowd of bad guys. The enemy A.I. is pretty smart as well. They'll utilize grenades to flush you and your buddy from cover, flank your position to get a better shot and if you're slow enough, they can execute your partner just like the way you can execute them. They do stupidly rush your position from time to time but for the most part, they keep their distance and stick to cover.

On the downside, you can't equip your team mate with guns when you're playing solo. While the game does seem to adapt to your style of play, it's a tad disappointing because you never really can tell when the AI is going to pick the wrong gun for the job. They also have a problem with confronting the larger enemies in 40th Day who wield chain guns, and flame throwers. For some strange reason, they occasionally abandon cover and venture out into the open where they mercilessly get gunned down by the heavies with the big guns. This can be pretty frustrating because it usually leads to a game over since you then have to go out into the same open territory your buddy just got ventilated in.


If you get sick of playing rock, paper, scissors, you and a buddy can challenge the rest of the world in the various Adversarial modes. There's Co-op Deathmatch, which is team deathmatch limited to teams of two. Control where players try to capture and hold objectives and finally there's Warzone, which gives two teams various objectives to accomplish like killing the other teams VIP's or taking their intel and bringing it back to your base. There's also another mode called Extraction which is locked for the time being so those who pre-ordered the game get to play through first. It's basically the same as horde mode with a twist. Four players will band together to fight through 16 rounds of Shanghai. When every wave has been eliminated, the round is complete players will move on to the next map of the area and each area has 4 maps to fight through. Team work is very important since there is no permanent defensive strategy. While you can't customize your loadout, players can hop onto the games official website and create their own designs for their masks and shoulder pads. Provided they have the proper account information. The multiplayer is very fun and can easily hook players, it's just too bad there's a lot of lag plaguing 40th Day's multiplayer and Extraction seems to be haunted by "ghosts". Enemies appear and disappear when the lag spikes up which can be very confusing in the heat of battle.

Fortunately enough, 40th Day looks good. You'll traverse through a variety of diverse, ruined environments and eventually notice how the game dips a bit into the black and white noir style near the end. There are some nice details to the animations as well. Melee animations will vary depending on how your gun is equipped from a swift one-two punch to a gruesome jab with a bayonet or snapping the neck of a downed enemy. Later on, grenades will also explode into a shower of diamonds which adds a certain touch of beauty to the explosions. There's not a whole lot of cut scenes outside of the morality scenes but the few you will see are nicely done. Audio however is another story. Outside of the guns lacking in the sound department, it's impossible to hear a lot of the dialogue that goes on between the duo and the characters they meet along the way. This is rather disappointing since you'll miss out on what little of the humor there is in the game.

You and your partner will lay waste to thousands of 40th Day mercs. Despite what is wrong with the game, it's still going to be fun whether you're alone or with a friend. Customizing is fun and will keep you experimenting for quite a bit with different attachments. The game also looks good and the multiplayer options are bound to attract those who want a solid cooperative experience. If you want a fun shooter to kick off the new year, then Army of Two: The 40th day is at least worth a rental until Mass Effect and BioShock 2 hit store shelves.