Continuing on my mission to play some old Xbox 360 games, I have finished the second entry in the Army of Two franchise.
40th Day takes place a little while after the end of the first game. Salem and Rios return and they’re working under their new private merc company. They’re on a mission in Shanghai, China. It seems to be a pretty simple task. Get to certain locations, place a transmitter, and move out. Surprise surprise, looks like they’re getting double-crossed again. Now the city is getting bombarded with explosives and everything is falling apart.
The story this time is different than the first game. Sure, Rios and Salem made a bad choice in taking a mission from a bad guy. But they’re also trapped in one location this time around. No more hover boating or parachuting into new maps. Which I think overall is alright. Makes the story more linear and easier to understand for the most part. Unfortunately, there is no way to turn on subtitles. Or there is no setting that I found for it. So that was a pretty big bummer. I missed some context in quite a few things. Ultimately, the story was good and had something new to offer this time around: morality choices.
The Morality choices were such a hit-or-miss situation. For example, the first choice is to kill the operator you were working with at the start of the game. If you killed him you lost morality but gained money. If you let him live you gained morality and that was it. Trying to be a good guy, I let him live. But after that, there is a comic book style cut scene. Shows him getting away and flying off to an island to lay low. But surprise, someone comes and assassinates him anyways. So it felt almost pointless. Every choice in the game is very clearly a good or bad choice. But sometimes going for the bad choice nets you new weapons and upgrades. So is it worth it? I did a few of them and never really felt good about any of them. Someone always ends up dead, most likely an innocent person, and the reward just doesn’t feel satisfactory enough. Trying to play it as close to watch a movie Merc would be like, I wanted to get these new weapons. I wanted to survive this hellish city. Overall though, just made me feel bad. Even good morality choices would backfire on you and someone would die. I( guess that’s how life is. You never really know what you’re going to get, which I respect.
The biggest issue I had with the first game was your AI partner. This time around definitely seems a lot better. The commands are the same, but it seems it follows it much more. Especially if you separate at certain times. It will auto-switch to holding positions and taking aggro, or pushing forward which is really nice.
I’m curious how the next game, Devil’s Cartel, is going to go. All I know about it is Salem and Rios are not the playable characters now. It’s two new guys that they recruited or something. But I want to know what the canon ending to 40th Day is as well. Because the ending could really set up some unfortunate stuff for the next game with the two friends.
Lastly, did Alice die? She was in the helicopter that crashed towards the end of the game. It never seemed to be confirmed in the game though. If she died, then what a disappointing way to kill off a character. There was almost no emotion to it at all. I guess I will find out with the next game.
Did you ever play The 40th Day? What did you think of it? Let me know!
The Tired Obsidian 