The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

There are plenty of questionable design decisions in Army of Two: The 40th Day. The controls, for example, are absolutely perplexing, and do nothing but frustrate. You can’t switch weapons when close to your teammate, for example, because the same button that switches weapons starts a game of Rock Paper Scissors, which is obviously more important in a game where you have to both work together and shoot people.

That is not the thing I want to highlight, though.

Essner and I were playing through, because hey, it was there, and we had started the campaign awhile back. After a dramatic cutscene, we got to a boss, where we then died. Well, no surprise there. The game is kind of hard and we’re fighting with the controls and aren’t great anyway. Might as well try again.

Only the game respawns us back before the last firefight. Then we have to watch the cutscene again: it can’t be skipped. Then we get back into the boss battle, and die immediately.
Then we do it again.
And again.
And again.

This is a third person, cover-based shooter. Have these people just never played other games in the genre to learn where to put checkpoints? This game developer has at least made one other game before, namely the first Army of Two. Surely they received feedback to tell them this is a bad idea? Hell, have these people EVER played a video game before? Nobody is okay with unskippable cutscenes, especially when you have to watch them a second time. This is why you checkpoint after every single cutscene.

This is simple stuff. Simple, simple stuff. The controls and such, I can believe. They tried to do something to give the player more options, and it kind of fucked up. Alright. I understand. But I just can’t understand how a game developer in this day and age can be completely clueless on how to put checkpoints and cutscenes in their game. There is years of history of video games to learn this from. Years. Congratulations, EA Montreal! You sure know how to go out of your way to fuck up what could be a fine to fun experience with mistakes nobody at this point in the history of video games should make.