Army of Two: The 40th Day- hands-on

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Tackling every criticism of the first game with gusto

You know you’re not in the real army the moment you take cover behind the corpse of an elephant. It’s just not something Soap McTavish, or Master Chief, or the guy out of Rainbow Six, would ever do. Maybe Marcus Fenix, but then he always was a bit sick. Other things masked soldier/nutjobs Salem and Rios get up to that proper soldiers generally don’t: sticking coke cans at the end of guns to make ad-hoc silencers, or jamming a kitchen knife on a rifle to form a fully working bayonet. Welcome (back) to the DIY world of a Private Military Company.

The setting’s shifted, from Everywhere in the World to a single city: Shanghai. Thanks to an ongoing disaster initiated by a mysterious terrorist group known as The 40th Day, the city’s falling apart around you. But Salem and Rios don’t appear to be particularly worried about that; they’re only trying to escape.

We played a level set in the Shanghai Zoo. It wasn’t a very good zoo, mainly because we only saw a couple of animals – an elephant and a hippo – and they were already very much dead when we arrived, but it did give us a chance to have a sample of the game’s combat.

It’s unforgiving. As expected, you’re not going to last very long if you run headlong into the fray, but we found it pretty difficult to even see the enemy from a distance. Although environments have been blessed with a significant amount of background detail – the game looks nice, if not exactly spectacular – actually working out where enemy bullets were coming from seemed a bit too much like hard work.

Tom Sykes
Tom Sykes
When he's not dying repeatedly in roguelikes, Tom spends most of his working days writing freelance articles, watching ITV game shows, or acting as a butler for his cat. He's been writing about games since 2008, and he's still waiting on that Vagrant Story 2 reveal.