Reviews// Army of Two: The Devil's Cartel

While firing ranges aren’t exactly a new concept in shooters, this one is particularly convenient. There are no loading screens, no travelling; at any point while browsing the shops you are only one button press away from testing your new toys out.

It’s incredibly easy to quickly compare different weapons or even try out different attachments to see what effects they really have on performance. You can even try before you buy to see if you’re feeling it before you spend your hard-earned money.

If you’re a little less practical with your cash however, there are other places to spend it. The Devil's Cartel offers a host of wardrobe options for the discerning soldier of fortune, and an even greater number of mask designs to choose from. You can even choose your arm tattoos, which strikes me as an odd choice given that extensive arm tattooing is seen as quite manly while dressing 3D soldiers up like dolls really isn’t.

What all this basically adds up to is that if you want to run around in biker leathers with a panda face mask and bright blue snakeskin-patterned guns covered in laser sights, you can. Which I think should definitely count for something.

If you want to stretch your artistic muscles there’s even a custom mask creator that lets you decorate your faceplate with all kinds of patterns and shapes. This is a kind of new feature to the series, the previous game let players create their masks on the game’s website and then import them into their game but this time you can use the mask creator straight from the main menu.

It’s a fun little addition despite being ultimately pointless. I’m normally all for getting creative but chances are you could spend more time creating masks than it will take to beat the game.

Which brings us to The Devil's Cartel’s biggest problem, the one that no number of quirky additions can overcome. It’s just too damn short.

The campaign is decidedly brief, clocking in at around ten hours of play. Hidden collectibles and the like would help offset this for some gamers, but the game lacks anything of the sort despite the fairly large open combat zones providing plenty of corners where things could potentially be hidden.

Knowing that there’s no reason to explore means you’ll charge through levels guns blazing, and the game will offer little resistance to you reaching the end in only a couple of days of casual play.

While the vast amount of weapon customisation and costumes gives you a good reason to play through multiple times and amass the money you’ll need to buy everything, it’s more likely you’ll grow bored of playing through the same missions over and over again long before you reach such a lofty target.

There’s also a conspicuous absence of any competitive multiplayer to maybe spice things up a little, despite such a thing being included in the last Army of Two game. Instead your only online option is to play co-op mode without being inflicted with a split screen, but that will hardly help you overcome any fatigue towards the main campaign. There’s just very little to do once you’ve beaten it the first however many times you can stand.

A lot of this review might have seemed quite negative, but my attitude towards Army of Two is more of a weary ‘been there, done that’ than actual dislike. The Devil's Cartel is a competent and entertaining enough shooter despite being unremarkable in most areas, and I definitely approve of the focus on good cooperative play. But frankly if you’ve played any other shooters over the last year or so then there’ll be absolutely nothing here that you haven’t seen before.#

If you really enjoyed the previous Army of Two games or others like Binary Domain and Spec Ops then you should feel right at home here, even if the wallpaper is starting to peel and the furniture desperately needs replacing. But if you haven’t played any of those then they’re definitely worth more of a look at than this tired effort.

Pros
+ Deep weapon customisation.
+ Fun character customisation.

Cons
- Doesn’t bring anything new to the table.
- Terrible story-telling.
- Short campaign.

SPOnG score: 5/10