Army of Two: The Devil’s Cartel

5 Overall Score
Gameplay: 6/10
Graphics: 5/10
Sound: 5/10

Voicechat is good in case you can't get Skype to work

Dumb story | Bland shooting | All-around forgettable

Game Info

GAME NAME: Army of Two: The Devil’s Cartel

DEVELOPER(S): Visceral

PUBLISHER(S): EA

PLATFORM(S): PS3, 360

GENRE(S): Action, Third-person Shooter

RELEASE DATE(S): 3/26/2013

Army of Two: The Devil’s Cartel is the third installment in the AO2 series, which pits you and a buddy (or an AI drone) against a Mexican drug cartel.  Initially to rescue hostages, the two-man-team of Alpha and Bravo gets sucked into a revolution, both in the country and in the mercenary organization they work for, and have to get out alive.  No bromance stuff this time, though.  You can’t hug your partner.

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First off, a bit of a history lesson.  Army of Two started out with such a good concept.  Shoot bad guys with your buddy, over the internet.  It was one of the first major-launch games that fully incorporated co-op into the main missions, and did a reasonable job of it.  The controls were terrible, the plot forgettable, and many of the action setpieces were just plain silly – two former army rangers shouting “BACK TO BACK!” rather than seeking cover in a firefight, srsly bro?  But the dialogue (in a third-person EA shooter!) and the polarizing lead characters had more wit than a throwaway shooter should be allowed to have, so it was granted a sequel.  Plus you could hug your friend.

The sequel, disappointingly, took much of the focus off the two characters and put much more into gun customization and control refinement.  This made the game a much tighter experience to play, but killed a lot of what made the first game really worthwhile – two bros killing Chinese guys while cracking jokes on one another.  It turned it into a lackluster entry to what was, at the time, becoming a saturated market.  However, you could still hug each other, and now you could also whomp each other on the noggin, Three-Stooges style.

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History lesson over, but it serves this point – now we have two of the blandest, whitest, most vanilla characters tromping around desert towns and junkyards against a sequence of stereotypical Mexican gangsters to save a girl they just met and kill their old boss.  Salem and Rios, with their talk of favorite Wu-Tang members while shooting faceless enemies, have been replaced.  Even these two fools’ dumb names – Alpha and Bravo – smack of boredom.  We’re apparently supposed to be interested in their idiotic banter (with such brilliantly-written revelations as “I got a girl back home”) that develops them more as characters.  Without creating a fully realized character, the gamer should project himself onto this blank canvas.  But the two characters are so soul-crushingly dumb, nobody wants to.  Give me Salem’s brash run-and-gun tactics, or Rios with a calculated kick to someone’s throat!  Not these nameless morons nobody cares about.  They were so dull I actually had forgotten I played, beat, and completed the laughably dumb extra content.  The reminder that I once owned and conquered this game was brought to me by my Gamestop receipt from trading it in, which I found in a desk drawer.

The plot attempts to pull twists to keep players engaged, but the biggest twist is so easy to figure out that the EVEN BIGGER TWIST(!) is how these dumb characters didn’t see it coming.  Spoiler alert – not that you’ll need it – your boss is a bad guy.  Other twists include two rappers getting killed, the genre-necessary stripping of all your weapons and equipment (please stop), and a man that has one leg when he should actually have two.  It’s like they let James Patterson write the game plot and script.  Awful.

The game also comes with a set of side missions dubbed “Overkill Mode,” which is the worst description ever, so here’s what it really is.  In the main game, when you build up enough Overkill Points(tm), you can set off Overkill mode with a lowercase m, which makes you invincible and gives you infinite clip size, negating the need to reload.  In “Overkill Mode” with a capital m, you have that ability throughout the entire stage.  All you need to do is get to the evac point within a generous time limit while holding down the trigger, and you win.  Easy and dumb doesn’t even begin to describe it.

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The use of Frostbite 2 engine for Devil’s Cartel is a waste of a licensing purchase.  Certain walls can be chipped away now.  Some textures glow, but not things you’d think would – a few set of body armor with dumb names (Magma, really guys?) are the major ones.  Activating Overkill mode and playing Overkill Mode cranks the “glow” slider up to 11, to where it’s difficult to discern targets in outdoor environments.  Rios got even fatter.  That’s the graphics in a nutshell.  The audio is functional, and voicechat works very well.  The voice actors have changed yet again, since I really doubt anyone wanted to pay Nolan North to reprise his role as Salem.

Ugh.

The Recommendation

This game is so stupid it should come with a warning. Avoid.

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Author: James View all posts by
Dangerously fat. Twitter: @hypersaline

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