In the second Army of Two game, 'The 40th hour' this time things a little weirder.
The mechanics are a lot changed up from the first game.
No longer do enemies have those bars and icons over them,
All the controls are 'updated' to play more like Gears of War
You hold A to sprint just like Gears, you tap A to snap into cover, so many things feel like they abandoned a lot of what made the first game unique to try to become another clone of the era.
A lot of the original mechanics are still there, you can still take cover in the old way too, and the cover shooting acts mostly the same, but theres a lot of odd features and additions.
The 'select button' feature remains, telling you where to go, but it looks pretty ugly now like some stupid visor, and it highlights enemies and other weird shit.
Like in the first game, suppressing enemies and flanking them was a huge deal, but in this game it isn't as emphesized and is more like a mindless shooter. And in the first game there were tons of enemies that you could only kill by sneaking behind them , but in this game its kind of few and far between.
In the first game, the online co-op is permanently broken and disabled because of EA
But, fortunately, for some reason, in 'The 40th Hour' the online co-op works, but it seems like it shouldnt. It says the servers are offline, but then it allows you to host anyway.
So its a good thing I was able to play this whole game with a co-op buddy, cause this game has some serious flaws that make it much less enjoyable than the first one.
Though, are some good new features, like the Shop, which can strangely but thankfully be used at any time by holding Y. You can buy weapons and attachments whenever you want. This is a big improvement over the first game where it awkwardly asked you in the beginning of the mission for upgrades, and then at random points in the levels, but if you accidentally skipped it or something you were shit out of luck. This game has the same quirk of the first one where it seems to give you way too much money and nothing to spend on it. Theres no real incentive to try out all sorts of different guns, besides if you're like a gun nut and have a hardon for that kind of thing or something. They all kind of feel the same and you end up slamming so many attachments on it anyway boosting the stats it doesnt really matter.
Also, you can pickup enemy weapns in this game, but you cant in the first.
So theres a few small additions that are actually improvmement,
However:
Most of the game is a massive janky, clunky, techincal disaster, and broken mess, and downgrade of the first game.
Where do I even start...
1) Theres no subtitles
2) Theres no audio controls for volume mixing. The audio is so awful and broken you cant hear ANY voices for 90% of the game. The music is way louder than everything else.
3) Because of this, we baiscally had no idea what the plot is about or most of the dialogue in the game. Just completely insane how they let this slide.
4) Worst of all, THE CONTROLS are some of the worst I maybe have ever seen.
Everything has an awful input lag where it feels like everything you press has a 1.5 second delay after it. Aiming becomes near impossible, it feels like you're streaming the game over a crappy internet connection and trying to 'remote' play it, its just that bad.
5) The game has severe framerate problems , most of the time it feels like its running at 15fps, frequently dropping to what feels like 10fps. This coupled with the awful controls leaves a dreadful experience
6) All the 'gears of war' influenced controls are just a clumsy mess, half the time when you want to snap into cover, you accidentally vault over walls, half the time when you want to pickup your friend, you accidentally vault over a wall, half the time when you want to NOT pickup your friend, you pick him up instead, it just goes on and on. None of the controls feel intuitive or good.
Even something as basic as using your weapon scope is some awkward Y+LB combination and the controls are so delayed and shit you accidentally end up switching weapons instead.
I could write a novel about how broken and clunky the controls are but i'll just say they're god awful.
7) And the critical blow is that the game is completely a bug ridden glitchy mess. A significant portion of the time the checkpoints would just glitch out and would stop working. A few times we had checkpoints say "Eliminate all the enemies in the area' and there were no enemies left, but it wouldnt progress. Turns out an enemy is stuck in the enviorment somewhere and you have to search around and kill his bugged AI.
Other times, the controls would completely break. One time it was like "press A to pretend to surrender" and then afterwards we were suppose to be able to shoot, but we were unable to use our guns and just got shot to death. This happened two times in a row, but miraculously fixed its self when I started sprinting and spamming buttons. Even the achievements are buggy and I didn't even get one for completing a chapter when I should have.
The difficulty curve of the game is pretty bonkers to. For the first half or so it was mildly challenging, we only had to restart a few checkpoints here and there, the game was almost even enjoyable, but then from missions 5-7(ending) the difficulty just got stupid. Almost every checkpoint in the second half we had to repeat 5-10 times. The game starts throwing dozens upon dozens of bullet sponge enemies at you, frequently doing bullshit things like spawning them behind you, ontop of you, or multiple RPG guys that one shot you before you can blink an eye. It starts to become a real slog and we got pretty damn frustrated at this point. Its almost like its not even challenging, but its moreso we were constantly fighting against the delayed laggy shit controls and abysmal framerate to be able to aim properly more than anything. To compensate for this, we end up buying 100 round magazines and basically just spray & praying the rest of the game because trying to aim properly was hopeless.
Some of the checkpoints in this game could give you nightmares. One of the levels towards the last half we played the same checkpoint over and over for literally an hour & a half. Inching our way towards hopefully seeing a new 'saving...' but getting one shot to RPG's or other bullshit or bad controls fucking us over. Then ontop of it once we actually did progress to the next part, we ran into the afforementioned 'fake surrender' bug and had to start all over again.
The whole game takes place in China and the locations are pretty generic and forgettable. ITs just apartment buildings/office buildings/streets the whole game. Though, there is one highlight level where you fight through a Zoo full of dead animals and elephants and stuff, that was kinda cool. Probably the best level in the game.
The whole game is a mess and seems like it was rushed or barely finished.
For example, youll be watching a cutscene then randomly you'll instead start watching a slideshow of some lazy deviantart comic book anime strips, what? The first game had pretty entertaining action packed high budget cutscenes, in this you get a bunch of awkward stupid looking comic pictures that looks like it was made by a 17 year old highschool girl.
This ontop of the fact that we had no idea what the fking story is about because of the broken audio, no subtitles, and extremely quiet dialogue just made for an awkward experience. I have no idea what the story was about.
This is made even worse by the fact that there are 'morality choices' where sometimes youl be confronted with Option A or B (usually just something shallow like good or bad) and most of the time we didnt even know the context of what was going on. I dont really know what impact the morality stuff has, if any at all, but I guess it made for a funny brief discussion with my co-op buddy.
It's so dissapointing because with a little more effort, this game could be pretty damn good.
If this had a PC port, with 60fps, fixed control latency, slightly tweaked control mapping, a few major bug fixes, subtitles, fixed audio, audio sliders, it could be a solid game. But no, as it stands on the 360, it quickly became a headache to play. Heres to hoping the third game is better?
5/10
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