SOOOO Much to Say

Ok, maybe I should let the commercial speak for itself first

Yeah, it is like that. Rock stars with guns. Juvenile stupidity by testosterone fueled jackasses, but in a good way. The first original gameplay in a shooter in far too long. The whole concept at the top level is that as a team, you are more than the sum of your parts, a good lesson for everything in life. The straightforward stuff, like getting a boost up onto something too high to climb up yourself, or pulling down a door together are just nice touches. They don’t impact the game play, they just make it cooler, kinda like the sweet armor and customizable face masks.

The rest of the gear is also all customizable. Some things like your rifle you can upgrade with new stocks, barrels, bigger magazines, or even a grenade launcher. These customizations are paid for by the cash you get for completing mission objectives or finding extra hidden stuff, like some fool’s laptop or briefcase. Most of them make you more lethal, and when business is killing, that is good for business. Some, like gold plating and chrome cosmetic “upgrades” are meant to just be flashy and piss people off, as part of the “agro” system, the real heart of the dual character system.

For those who have played an MMO before, the concept of Agro is old hat, just not with a chain gun and flames painted on your armor. The goal is that when you are facing a large group of people not wanting you to continue living for whatever reason, one person finds a nice place to get their attention, by shooting at them of course, while the other person takes advantage of their attention being elsewhere to sneak through their lines, tearing them apart from the side or behind. If your buddy has enough agro (a meter at the top of the screen shows the ago balance) you become stealthed, turning invisible to the enemy until you get up close or start shooting. If the guy with agro stays at the extreme long enough he starts glowing red and a big skull shows up on the meter, and after a few seconds you can go into overdrive where the stealther moves at double speed and is totally invisible, while the guy with agro screams some crazy shit and now does double damage and pretty much tears everything up. Agro also impacts your mele attacks, which seriously kick ass in a ridiculous over the top way. You can have your buddy be the agro magnet, or you can do it and tell him to go forth  and bust some heads. It is fun to watch as he glides through their ranks, sending them flying like rag dolls. Don’t worry, they are all bad people, so it is ok to giggle when they die… I think.

Yes, there are some game mechanics that could use some improvement, and I look forward to the next version where they will hopefully fix them. There probably could be more replay value by adding new weapons or missions or something, but in my opinion, the cool new stuff more than made up for the problems. I hear good things about the co-op play, but I am on a break from online video games, so I won’t know about that for a while (google the Internet Dickwad Theory for a simple explanation to my vacation from the internet). The biggest problem I found in this game though was that some reviewers, like Tycho at Penny Archade, are somehow trying to make it seem like a bad thing for me to enjoy playing with “belligerent, vile psychopaths”. There is a reason nobody makes freaking green-peace video games. If you are gonna kill stuff for money in a game, I don’t want it to be slowed down with some lame ethical discussions by killers with a conscience.

Back to some more cool stuff though, cuz I don’t want to end this review on the bad stuff…… You get hit, you go down, your buddy comes running to help, he grabs you by your collar like in the video, and just like in the video, you just keep shooting while he pulls you to safety and then patches you up. You like the sweet rifle he has, you tell him “you can’t handle that” and he swaps with you. You get surrounded, you go back to back and in slow motion you spin around while mowing down waves of fools that don’t seem to notice all their dead buddies. Shit gets thick and you need to rush some fools, just rip the door off a car and use it as a shield while your buddy snuggles up against you and shoots over the top. Ok, that is a little fruity, but it is no time to be homophobic, this is WAR. You feel the need to add to the stupidity (and I always do), you get close to your buddy and bump fists, play air guitar with your guns, or just smack them in the head (seriously, if you have never been in an environment where guys did that to each other as part of bonding, I feel sorry for you, you prancing little nancy-boy).

Your reward for reading through all that babbling, a little behind the scenes video of Mastodon.