It Takes Two

 


It Takes Two is a whimsical two player split screen co op adventure platforming/puzzle game. If one person buys a copy, they can give a friend invite to a friend for free.

The premise of the game starts off with a divorce and the child being upset. Then the wife and husband somehow gets turned into little toy figurines to go through the world and overcome obsticles to salvage their marriage. There's this Book of Love character that talks in a hispanic accent and is all about couples counselling and marriage therapy to guide you through your journey. The overall first impression is like, yeah, this could be okay, but playing it co-op with two dudes just feels wrong. Like it seems like a girlfriend kind of game, not something to play with the bros. But we continued on. The presentation is the whole game is split down the middle, splitscreen, so you can always see what your friend is doing, which is a neat addition for a really pure focused co-op experience.

At first the game is pretty simple, basic platforming and 3d controls, it seems influenced by Mario 64 a bit in the controls and jumping, you traverse all sorts of enviornments almost like something out of Toy Story or a Pixar movie, because the graphics look really cartoony or cutsey, but as the game progresses it starts to continually throw new mechanics and gimmicks at each of the playable characters to force cooperation and puzzle solving. So for big chunks of the game you will each be using a different item required to progress. Early in the game Cody gets nails which he can throw into the wall, and May gets a hammer. Another section in the game cody gets a Sap gun cannon thing, and May gets an explosive that detonates the sap. Another point in the game, Cody gets a clock to reverse/slow time and May gets an ability to create clones of herself to snap around the world as time changes. And so on etc. The developers themselves have said something like "You will never see the same thing twice" and pride themselves on the amount of mechanics and changes the game takes the player through. And they were pretty much right, the game does have a huge variety of activities and minigames and small little challenges for you to do, from interacting with all sorts of weird contraptions or switches, all sorts of intense platforming sections that require the second person to change the platforms for the first person, all sorts of little vehicle and flying sections, theres even multiple boss fights that require either shooting the boss with some item or making the boss land on certain places. Theres no shortage of variety in the gameplay and puzzle solving. But on the one hand, thats kind of a detriment to the experience. The problem, for us, is that It Takes Two just left us feeling really bored a lot of the time. I think maybe the constant puzzle solving and having to stop and run around in circles trying to figure out what little gimmicky mechanic it wants us to do more often than not just put our brains into snooze mode instead of excitement. Yes, the platforming sections are pretty fun, with wall jumps and tight controls, but the pacing of the game is such that you wont be doing the same thing for very long. So what that essentially means, is when youre doing something fun, well - it wont be fun for long. You'll stop doing that activity and then do some other activity or puzzle, or running around the psuedo-open world sections trying to figure out what is required to progress next admist the dozens of random little optional minigames. So more often than not we were just bored or annoyed at the game. I think the biggest problem is the games length. The first 5 or so hours we were into it and pretty much enjoying it, but the game drags on and on and went on for another 10 hours. So it took us 15 hours to finally finish it. And by around hour 8 or so we were kind of writing off the game as no longer being fun, but annoying. It took us a month of on-and off playing this game to beat it because we just couldnt bring ourselves to launch it and get through it because we knew it was likely we'd just be bored the whole time. It also doesn't help that all the dialog, cutscenes, and characters, are just flat out unlikable. The book of love spanish guy is just annoying and over the top stupid, the story is predictable, cliche, and moralizing, the characters Cody and May are one dimensional extremely safe generic people with boring, uninspiring lives and personalities. May says "Cody!" way too much in her annoying stupid British accent. Cody is is as stale as plain bread. The artstyle of the characters is just weird and unappealing too. I can compliment the game on its huge variety of enviornments and locations, some of the visuals are genuinely awesome and graphically impressive and does almost feel like a real time video game Pixar movie in quality, but the game tends to go into these huge sprawling psuedo open world sections where its hard to figure out what to do because most of the things you can interact with are just optional minigame gimmicks and the actual thing to progress is hidden somewhere, so it just gets dull and has bad pacing.

It feels like a high quality product in terms of controls, visuals, polish, etc. It seems like a lot of attention to detail, care, and techincal fidelity went into this. Like I said, theres a lot of amazing visuals and areas in this game, the huge variety of enviornments definitely helps a lot. But for all sorts of reasons, within about 40 minutes of starting the game up, I just start to feel bored. I jokingly refer to this game as "It Makes Snooze".

The platforming sections are the best sections, the grinding on rails, jumping around helping your coop partner traverse the platforms in splitscreen, are fun. A lot of the puzzles can tend to be annoying or stupid, but a lot of them are also clever. The game also tends to have a problem where it interrupts the players constantly with cutscenes sometimes once every 60 seconds which doesnt feel great.


The last section of the game is something like each character finding their passions and then coming together again. Mays passion is singing, so you have to put up with this crooning woman constantly belting out vocal melodies and Cody's passion is gardening or some shit, so you play these goofy sections of turning into a flower or turning into plants or something , its kinda just stupid and weird. The singing bit was kinda cringe too because its all about her fixing up a stage to go on stage and sing for the crowd, then they kiss and make up and the whole family is back together again amen walk into sunset end credits, seemed trite to me.

I'm not sure what else to say, the games flaws is that it drags out its welcome, sometimes its hard to figure out what to do admist all the optional minigame shit, constantly having new mechanics and items and features while is kinda cool, it actually kind of hurts the game because it means when you do something fun, you wont be doing it for long or it will be replaced with something you dont find fun, the game is maybe too high on the puzzle side and not high enough on the platform side, the boss fights were atleast pretty fun overall. The penalty for death is really forgiving, you kinda just respawn inches away from your last death, unless both players die then you reload some checkpoint so its not a difficlt game or anything, it can just tend to be boring with all the puzzle solving and figuring out how to progress. As I said, the characters and dialogue arent really that likable, the constant cutscenes and cliche story is pretty eyeroll inducing frequently. If the game was around 6 hours long, I would be a lot more forgiving, and even consider replaying it with someone else in the future, but at 15 hours long I never wanna think about this game again.
 

4/10