Other than Halo 3, Gears of War, Rainbow Six: Vegas, Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2 and perhaps Crackdown (feel free to disagree), there haven’t been many excellent (and the key word is excellent) cooperative games for the Xbox 360.
Electronic Arts is hoping to change that with its impending, or currently, release of Army of Two; hopefully it’ll provide some actual decent co-op gameplay and also remain fun to play (unlike Kane & Lynch).
Game Focus sat down with Reid Schneider, senior producer on Army of Two, and topics discussed include the game’s uniqueness and sequel plans.
Regarding Army of Two’s uniqueness, Schneider compared the game’s co-op backbone to Contra, in terms of that both games were built from the ground up to completely support cooperative gameplay. He also mentions that while Gears of War and Halo 3 had good co-op, they felt like an add-on.
"Army of Two was built up as a co-op shooter from ground up. So in our game, co-op isn’t just a mode, it’s the game. Gears of War and Halo 3 very terrific in that department but it was just an add-on.
Every design decision in Army of Two had co-op in mind. Remember Contra? That was the co-op experience we want people to go have! We went back a lot and looked at what was really cool about those games back in the day, and that feel is what we wanted to translate into this next gen."
You may be thinking that talking about sequel plans at this point is pretty moot, but Schneider said that franchise plans are on the table. Army of Two will be EA Montreal’s first game, so he remained optimistic that fans would enjoy it.
"We’re very excited about this game and our plans to turn this into a successful franchise are present. It’s our very first next-gen game coming from our Montreal studio and we hope people will like it! From there’ we’ll see!"
Here’s my glass in hope that Army of Two does well, unlike the hilariously bad Conflict: Denied Ops, yikes.
