games

there was a coop shooter called army of two. The mechanics were kinda fun, you could lift your buddy over a wall to shoot and lower him back down to reload and stuff like that.

The dialogue could pass for a parody of 2000s dude bro culture if it wasn’t being played straight and ridden with slurs.

With the dialogue, It’s toxic masculinity the game. Say fucked up shit, do violence, fist bump while cracking a joke that’s only funny if the audience is a case deep in natty light and probably skipping class in the morning.

The story is incredibly poor as well and probably problematic (can’t be assed to look up the plot), so removing the mission briefings would also improve it.

Despite all that, if taken devoid of context the raw mechanics had potential. An inverse of spec ops: the line, a game carried entirely by the narrative choices and message, but dragged down by run of the mill mechanics.

The suppressing fire mechanic was kind of interesting. It worked like an aggro meter and when maxed out one player was all but invisible to the enemies while the other one was drawing all the attention.

It had strong gun customization for a console shooter at the time. Lots of cosmetic choices as well. It handled competently, the movement was weighty when dragging a downed ally behind cover.

Apparently the sequel improved the mechanics, but I never played it. Maybe they fixed the writers room.