Army of Two: Difference between revisions

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The story starts Salem and Rios as members of the 75th Army Rangers in Somalia, where they're ordered to assist a PMC named Phillip Clyde eliminate Mo'Alim, a Somali warlord. Following the completion of the mission, SSC CEO Ernest Stockwell offers Salem, Rios, and their CO positions in his company.

 

 

A major mechanic of this game is "Aggro", summed up as the amount of attention you currently have from your enemies. Bigger and flashier weapons garner more aggro, and therefore, more attention, allowing your partner to move around unnoticed, while smaller, quieter, and less noticeable weapons allow you to let your partner draw attention. Aggro is represented by a meter on one side of the screen; players enter [[Super Mode]] by maintaining their place with the Aggrometer buried on one side until Overkill is activated.

 

 

 

{{tropelist}}

* [[Action Girl]]: Alice proves she knows how to handle a gun in ''The 40th Day.''

* [[Anticlimax]]: {{spoiler|There's no real buildup to the final boss of ''The 40th Day,'' and in fact, he's not even a boss fight, just a [[Sadistic Choice]] in human form. Most people agree that ''40th Day'' is better than the original on most points but a lot of people also ''really'' hate the ending of the game.}}

* [[Awesome but Impractical]]: The M134 minigun. Awesome because of its [[Gatling Good|high rate of fire and intimidating appearance]]. Impractical because of its spooling-up time, which is longer than most of the windows of fire you'll have.

* [[Ax Crazy]]: Phillip Clyde.

* [[Badass]]: Salem and Rios try, but they come off more like fratboys than anything else a few times though.

** Largely agreed, but possibly except for in the cases of the trope above and during Overkill mode.

* [[Blown Across the Room]]: Certain guns are apparently powerful enough to knock enemies down even if they haven't depleted their [[Hit Points]].

* [[Bottomless Magazines]]: invoked whenever [[Back-to-Back Badasses]] occurs, or when [[Unstoppable Rage|Overkill]] is activated.

* [[Bullet Sparks]]

* [[Bullet Time]]: Only when Salem and Rios go back-to-back or during Overkill in the original. In the sequel, you get a few moments of it during Co-op Mock Surrender.

* [[Cool Guns]]: All the entries appear in ''Army of Two''.

* [[Cluster F-Bomb]]: Clyde drops them repeatedly. The dialogue of the game was supposedly this in general, but most of it was cut.

* [[Cutscene Boss]]: {{spoiler|Dalton}} is not fought in the original, instead being quickly and anti climatically offed in the final cutscene. EA did later release a free DLC expansion where you do fight him head-on, though.

* [[Darker and Edgier]]: The 40th Day seems to be going down this path, with a darker tone, [[Karma Meter|moral decisions]], and recast voice actors for our protagonists.

* [[Deconstructed Trope]]: The second game deconstructs morality choices. Every time you make a choice when the game prompts you, you are shown a flash-forward of events influenced by this choice, events that Salem and Rios will, in fact, never come to know of or even suspect. The positive or negative morality of the choice you pick often has little direct bearing on these events. [[Not Quite the Right Thing|It's possible a choice that seems like the decent thing to do will lead to the suffering of others]], being a bad person could lead to a favorable outcome for those involved, or the result could be completely neutral.

* [[Faceless Goons]]: Inverted in that Rios and Salem ''are'' the [[Faceless Goons]].

** The dehumanizing aspect of this trope has been noted by the developers, who have, in ''The 40th Day'', made Salem and Rios push their masks up when out of combat to humanize them to an extent.

* [[Gun Accessories]]

* [[Heterosexual Life Partners]]: Salem and Rios, arguably, but there's a lot of [[Ho Yay]].

** Consider that at the end of ''The 40th Day,'' Salem and Rios don't stop to think about the possibility that Jonah could be lying, so despite the fact that {{spoiler|there is no nuke,}} killing Jonah means they're willing to consign millions to their deaths for each others' sake. This is played distinctly as [[The Power of Friendship]], not apathy.

* [[Honor Before Reason]]: Rios exemplifies this in the original. In the sequel, this part of his personality has apparently been beaten out of him via Plot.

* [[Infant Immortality]]: In ''The 40th Day'', {{spoiler|our antiheroes meet a kid in a hospital, who assists them. He asks them if they want him to try and get a sniper rifle. If the player(s) say "yes", [[Subverted Trope|he gets shot while he's jumping up and down in celebration]]. This would have slightly more impact if he wasn't flagged by the enemy AI as hostile, and they didn't sometimes shoot [[Special Effects Failure|straight through him]] with no effect ''before'' the script says he needs to be hit.}}

* [[I Surrender, Suckers]]: A chief mechanic in the second game. Though, [[Fridge Logic|one would think the mercenaries would catch on after the first couple of times]]. ...if, you know, they survived it long enough to report.

*** The whole point of surrendering in the second game isn't to actually survive the encounter through non-lethal means, but to give the bad guys a moment of "what do we do now" while your partner maneuvers into position to kill them. Given that Salem and Rios are {{spoiler|partially responsible for the missile attacks on Shanghai}}, they're ''way'' beyond caring about war crimes anyway.

* [[It's All Upstairs From Here]]: The last half of the final level takes place in the {{spoiler|1=SSC Tower}}.

** Not to mention that there are hardly any moments in the game where you're going downhill. The levels are almost entirely flat or uphill.

* [[Karma Meter]]: ''The 40th Day'' introduces two Karma Meters, one for Camaraderie (your ingame relationship with your partner, improved by complimenting them or doing silly stuff with them, reduced by shooting them or expressing disapproval with their actions), and one for Morality (your treatment of your enemies and allies - for example, shooting a surrendered enemy reduces your morality, while any enemy defeated non-lethally increases it).

* [[Leet Lingo]]: Everything s3kshun8 says is rendered in leetspeek, making it very difficult to understand for most people.

* [[Meaningful Name]]: The Senator who supports the bill to privatize the military {{spoiler|thus supporting the PMC that's deliberately getting US soldiers killed to increase its own profits}} is Senator Richter. The good-guy Senator trying to stop it is Whitehorse. Ernest Stockwell owns SSC, a company whose ''stock'' is doing ''well.''

* [[Mega Corp]]: Halfway through the Iraq mission, SSC purchases Black Mountain Industries to become the largest PMC in the world.

* [[More Dakka]]: And the more dakka you have, the more dakka you get. You can even cause your guns to have less dakka if you want to get less dakka back.

* [[No-Gear Level]]: A segment during ''The 40th Day'' forces you to pick up guns from people you kill as you go along.

* [[No One Could Survive That]]: {{spoiler|Phillip Clyde survives going down with an airliner. He may have also survived getting kicked out an office tower window, but the sequel has announced he won't be returning for it.}}

* [[One-Man Army]]: Well, a ''two'' man army, but still....

* [[Pre-Ass-Kicking One-Liner]]: Happens when either Salem or Rios max out their aggro. Example below:

* [[Psycho for Hire]]: Phillip Clyde ''really'' wants to tell you about all the cool shit he wants for Christmas. He also has the habit of carving bloody smiles into the people he kills in Dirty Money.

* [[Ragdoll Physics]]

* [[Rare Guns]]: The M134 Minigun, just as man-portable and self-powered as it was in ''[[Predator]]'', and the Desert Eagle.

* [[Reality Is Unrealistic]]: The game is frequently criticized for having its protagonists act like fratboys. Anyone whose seen [[Generation Kill]] or is familiar with actual mercs (or even high-morale military units) knows that it's not that far off. Yes, even down to the [[Ho Yay]].

* [[Red Oni, Blue Oni]]: Rios and Salem, respectively.

* [[Refuge in Audacity]]: In ''The 40th Day,'' just ''try'' not to laugh when Salem and Rios discuss the panda incident.

* [[Rule of Cool]]: Not many PMCs employ battalions of bemasked, heavily armored soldiers, but damn if its not ''awesome.''

* [[Sadistic Choice]]: In the ending of ''The 40th Day'', {{spoiler|Jonah's confronted with an extremely angry Salem and Rios. One has to kill the other or he'll set off a nuke his men have placed in the city. Extremely effective because we've learned by then that the entire purpose of the attack is an experiment to see how people will react. This conceals the fact that Jonah is ''[[Villains Never Lie|lying,]]'' because it's perfectly in-character for him.}}

** Also an option in ''The 40th Day'', in some circumstances. The major choice you're offered in the demo is "Kill the ex-SSC contact or let him go". The consequences are shown to you immediately, but sometimes, you're exchanging a reward now for a reward later...

** Likewise in the comic Dustin, a former ranger friend, comments on Rios "Rocking the Skeletor," look.

** Nearly every achievement on the 360. Some of the better ones:

*** ''[[Predator|If It Bleeds, We Can Kill It]]''

*** ''[[The Fifth Element|Big Boom! Big Badda Boom!]]''

** In the same vain, one of the sniper rifle barrel upgrades in both games is the MGS Sniper-Wulf.

** In the first game, the M92 pistol features a barrel upgrade called the "Samurai Edge;" this was the name of the custom 92's used by [[Resident Evil|S.T.A.R.S.]]

* [[Sniping Mission]]: Salem and Rios can "Co-Op Snipe" to take out two separate targets, or focus their damage on a single target.

* [[Sociopathic Hero]]: Salem and Rios seem to have very little problem with killing a whole lot of people. Sure, the people they kill are bad guys, and trying to kill ''them'', and they also happen to be trained soldiers, but... Rios is arguably the more heroic/idealistic one in the original. In the sequel, Salem is, from early trailers and the demo, more idealistic/heroic and Rios is just jaded and bitter, essentially trading positions.

* [[Stuff Blowing Up]]: Taken to absurd levels in the sequel, where virtually the entire first level is various Shanghai buildings exploding. And a good portion of the second. And the opening of the third.

* [[Super Mode]]: In overkill mode one mercenary becomes an unstoppable killing machine who [[Bottomless Magazines|never needs to reload]] and does double damage while the other one becomes invisible, also never needing to reload.

* [[The Syndicate]]: Black Mountain industries in the backstory comic was involved in such dirty business as hiring out muscle to Chinese Triads, narcoterrorists, Kosovo paramilitary groups and shipping Eastern European sex slaves through New Orleans. Nice guys.

* [[Timed Mission]]: Destroying a missile and {{spoiler|1=escaping the ''USS Constellation'' before it sinks}}.

* [[Title Drop]]: Every bit as goofy as the rest of the game when it shows up.

* [[Villains Never Lie]]: {{spoiler|There's no nuke.}}

 

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[[Category:Army Of Two]]