Cover image for Army of Two: The Devil's Cartel. Photo / Supplied
The latest Army of Two adventure begins as so many games do these days - with an ambitious recreation of a Hollywood film's opening scenes. You've got the varied camera angles, dialogue that's slightly too vague to be useful as exposition, superimposed credits. It promises a good time.
Our heroes
are in Mexico, riding with other mercenaries in a convoy protecting the one politician staunch enough to take the fight to the country's drug cartels. There are armed men walking the rooftops along the route. The rent-a-warriors trade comments about the dullness of this routine operation.
After the predictable ambush and slaughter of almost everyone involved, the game throws you back in time to a basic training session where you'll learn what the buttons do, because printed manuals went out of fashion years ago. It is here that things start to go horribly wrong.
The game paints itself into a corner artistically here, sacrificing its story flow so you can teach yourself how to outflank an enemy as if it's some brilliant new concept that hasn't been done a million times before.
There are some nice gems in the dialogue, including a quip about red barrels always being explosive, but for every good line there are half-a-dozen clangers - often sexist, but usually just the kind of daftness that makes it about as far as the second draft of a high school drama group's original script before the teacher rightly eliminates it with thick red ink. In the gentlest terms I can possibly find, this should not surprise you as a player because your operatives in this game are absolute dribbling idiots. I know I said the original Gears of War trilogy was a bit thick-skulled, but this game takes the cake and head-butts it into unpalatable mush.
