The 40th day was released in 2010 and is the second game in the Army of Two series. I had originally rented it when it came out and played all the way through the game on my own, this is definitely not how these games are meant to be played. I did however, play through the game again this year with a friend and on the hardest difficulty. This makes the game much more fun and more of a challenge.
This game flourishes in co-op. As you're playing with a human partner, you can communicate and play as a pair, rather than hope the AI would work well with you. This game has decisions you have to make and the game heavily focuses on morality. Whatever decision you pick, it shows the outcome in the form of a comic book story. You can instantly regret the decision after seeing the outcome which engages you and really makes you think about the choices you're about to make. If you're playing with a partner, whoever picks first will make the decision and it'll stick, even if you didn't agree, so it can even cause friction with your partner if you can't agree on a decision.
This game has a lot of great features and most of them are co-op features. There's the back to back were you and your partner spin around killing any enemies in the vicinity. You can pick up shields or even rip off small doors and use them as shields that you and your partner can use as movable cover. There's co-op snipe were you and your partner mark targets and mock surrender were you pretend to surrender to the enemies, pull out your gun and catch them by surprise. You can even flip over tables for extra cover.
The customization is great, you can pick your weapons attachments and camouflages, you can pick your characters mask too. If enemies are behind weak covers like wood, you can shoot through making it seem more real. When you sneak up on enemies, you can take them hostage and tie them up avoiding a firefight. You can also save hostages the enemies have taken, adding to the morality and making you decide whether you will save them.
If your partner goes down, they aren't actually killed as you can revive them. It can be quite slow though, as there's an animation of your partner grabbing them and turning them around, so it can be difficult to revive eachother on hard difficulties. You can whip out your pistol and shoot enemies while you're down and also your partner can drag you around while you're down to get you behind cover if you were out in the open. When you get close to death you can 'feign death', which makes you play dead, so enemies ignore you and it gives you a chance to recover and then spring up to action. There's also some tough enemies that are kinda like mini bosses and they take some time to kill, these are the big guys with miniguns or grenade launchers, these oppose quite a challenge.
The story is set in Shangai, but the story is nothing special. It's pretty forgettable once it's finished, depending on your final decision I guess. The story is pretty dark, innocent people, animals and even children are killed, this is a pretty mature game. The game's hard difficulty is quite challenging, even with a human partner, but the main problem was that there was so many enemies, it just felt like the difficulty was set to 'Enemy spam' rather than hard. The enemy spawns were also a pain, as you would be attacking enemies and then all of a sudden they spawn around you and you die and go back to the previous checkpoint.
Overall I enjoyed the game and thought the gameplay was great! I loved all the small features in the game like making your own shield and was a great game to play cooperatively.
6.7/10
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