Army of TWO: The 40th Day

"How hard is it for you NOT to kill somebody?"

Source // PlayStation

Here's what I know of Army of TWO: The 40th Day before playing it: two masked mercenary dudes bro their way through whatever warzone they find themselves in, and they wear customized riot masks.

Here's what I didn't know of Army of TWO: The 40th Day before playing it: it's the second of three Army of TWO games. How did this concept get three whole games out of it? What are video games even doing in the 2010s?

I don't know where I first heard of Army of TWO but I can safely say I wasn't too bothered about whether I played it or not, and so I didn't. Should I have not missed an opportunity to buddy up and take on the world while donning a weird mask?

Red Faction: Guerrilla

I came in like a wrecking ball.

A long time ago, back on the PlayStation 2, I took a punt on Red Faction, a first-person shooter set on Mars whose gimmick was that the environment around you was entirely destructible. Couldn't see a way through? Whip out your rocket launcher and make one. Enemy hiding behind cover? Reduce that cover to rubble.

It got a sequel that I also played, but by the end of both games, I couldn't tell you what they were about, beyond blowing up walls. Their selling point was fun, but not so long-lasting, and any desires for a third game felt largely hopeless - I certainly wasn't bothered about getting one. What else could they do?

How about an explosive third-person smash 'em up where you can knock out entire buildings with a sledgehammer as you fight against the EDF and take Mars back, guerrilla warfare style, in Red Faction: Guerrilla?

At the time of release, I wasn't really interested. Now? Well, let's find out if I was wrong.

Resident Evil 5

"More and more I find myself wondering if it's all worth fighting for. Maybe one day, I'll find out."

An awful lot of games can trace back some of their DNA to Resident Evil 4, the third-person, over-the-shoulder survival horror that managed to merge the old with the new. Despite not quite liking how it feels to play and still stumbling to get to grips with it, I can see how it shines to many people.

But how do you follow RE4? Do you lean into that new control scheme, even if it means pushing the gameplay towards the action genre, potentially bringing you a new audience, but perhaps irking some of your old fans? Do you play it safe and stick with what works, tweaking what needs tweaking to keep everything up to date?

Resident Evil 5 had some big footsteps to follow, and from what I can tell, for every player that thought it succeeded, there's another player who thought it didn't. Maybe they should buddy up and work things out together in the scorching heat of a bio-terrorized Africa.

Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots

"This is good... isn't it?"

Source // Konami

Not too long ago, I said when looking back to the Grand Theft Auto series, I'd want to go back and play GTA IV before any of the others. It's not that it is the 'best', but it is the title that called to me the most.

There's another long-running series with games that ought to be returned to more than once, and another game with a '4' stuck on the end, but this one, Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots has a lot more going on.

If GTA IV is something I want to go back to and relive, MGS4 is something I'm not sure I do want to go back to - not sure to the point of having spent the last few days watching some 7 hours of YouTube video essays on the game instead of actually putting it into my PS3 for the first time in years.

Metal Gear Solid has been my top-rated game on this 1001 list since its appearance and is unlikely to be moved. MGS2 and MGS3 are up there too, the latter still sitting in the top ten. MGS4... well, MGS4 has a lot to unbox and I'm not sure where to begin.

Gears of War 2

"I have a rendezvous with Death"

Source // Xbox

When all you know is war, I guess it's inevitable that the war won't stop. When all you are is an impossibly proportioned man fueled by diesel and wearing parts of a car for protection, you probably don't get up to much else other than shooting things. It's a good job Gears of War 2 exists to keep the guys employed, is what I'm getting at, because I've no idea what they'd do without it.

Marcus Fenix and the gang return in a sequel supposedly bigger and badder than the first outing, the game that effectively unleashed cover-shooters into the world. What form will the chest-high walls take in this game? What horrors will we willingly march into for the sake of mankind's survival? Just how gruff can we shout this line of dialogue?

Let's time our reloads right and kick down the door to find out.

Warhawk

Now land it.

Source // PlayStation

The 1001 book contains a lot of pictures, and it usually brings out a chuckle when I find that the imagery chosen was one of the first you could find with a basic image search. What puzzles me from time to time, though, is imagery that doesn't quite represent the game that it's attached to.

You see, I'm lead to believe that Warhawk is about flying a fancy looking futuristic jet fighter through the skies as war rages below you. At least that's what the box art shows me. And doesn't 'hawk' lend itself to aircraft more than tanks?

A multiplayer exclusive game for the PlayStation 3, whose single-player content was supposedly cut for lack of quality. Ooh. This is going to be tricky.

Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2

Or GRAW 2, for an easier time of things...

Source // PlayStation

Do you remember when the future of warfare was all interlinked video feeds and heads up displays and tactical battle maps fed directly into soldiers' brains or something? A future where every aspect of the fight was data-driven? Satellites buzzed overhead and beamed down what might as well be live footage of the battlefield, soldiers scoped the field with drones and robots, augmented reality displays told you exactly how close to death an enemy combatant was, as well as allowing you to see him through walls.

This is the kind of near-future that makes for great video games, and it's the kind that authors like Tom Clancy can run with. What would it mean to lose your electronic connection in the war? You'd have to use your own eyes and your own brain. That'd be barbaric, and I'd be lost.

As it happens, Tom Clancy lent his name to a series of tactical shooters called Ghost Recon, and as the series went on, the future became more futuristic and it adopted this hyper-connected digital battlefield experience in the form, ultimately, of Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2, a bit of a mouthful, but basically a way to say "Future Soldiers, look!"

And who doesn't want to be part of a cool squad of near-future soldiers?

Syphon Filter: Logan's Shadow

"Chief I'm picking up something. A distress signal."

You might think third-person shooter action stealth games are both hard to succinctly describe and dominated by the likes of Metal Gear Solid and Splinter Cell, but there are entire series of games in this vein that players could enjoy just as much. Well, in theory. One of those series is Syphon Filter, of which I know so little about despite there being six games over the span of just 8 years.

As a fan of MGS, you might have thought I'd be somewhat aware of its competition, or at least somewhat similar games, but with regards to Syphon Filter and it's sixth and final entry, Logan's Shadow, that just isn't the case.

I was shocked to learn that this game was the sixth entry in the series, and shocked once more when it was initially a PlayStation Portable title, only getting a PlayStation 2 port three years later. To complete the shocking trilogy, it plays rather well. Let's find out how.

Stranglehold

Presented by John Woo

Source // PlayStation

At what point did people start thinking that video games could truly be cinematic? It must have been around the time of the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, right? When graphics were a clear leap above and beyond the previous consoles, which simply couldn't come anywhere close, and PC gamers didn't care. A cinematic game that pushes the hardware and delivers all the action and thrills of a Hollywood film is something now within the reach of a storyteller. Visually, I mean. To some degree.

So how do you go about showing that these modern machines are capable of such a spectacle? Maybe you reunite director John Woo with star Chow Yun-fat to make a sequel to their 1992 hit Hard Boiled. Maybe you show Stephen Spielberg that there really are better things than the Nintendo Wii to make- oh, you really do want a sequel to Hard Boiled? Okay, uhm, what about John Woo Presents Stranglehold?

Inspector Tequila Yuen returns, weapons in both hands, muscled stretched and limbered up ready for diving and clambering and showing off how stylish John Woo can make his movies. Only this time, it's a game.

How's that going to work?

Earth Defense Force 2017

"We have to kill these people-eating monsters!"

Source // Moby Games

Brainless games have their place on store shelves, digital or otherwise. You can't always have the epic storylines, the incredible characters, or the game-changing mechanics. Sometimes, you just need to put something into the world for people to have fun with.

That's surely the reasoning behind the release of Earth Defense Force 2017, the near-future story where the planet is descended upon by giant insects and the shiniest of robots, working together to annihilate everything in sight - which happens to be what you'll be doing, armed with every kind of weapon you can think of to deal with this monumental problem.

You're not afraid of spiders, are you?

Gears of War

Attack of the Chest-High Walls

How many times has this 1001 list proven that games build upon what came before, tweaking and adapting them, taking genres in new directions? It happens an awful lot. Nothing is original, after all, and taking inspiration from Resident Evil 4 and Kill Switch, Gears of War helps demonstrate the point - before every other third-person shooter started acting like Gears of War.

The description is simple enough. Battle-hardened soldiers tackle an invasion coming from beneath their very feet, using chest-high walls for cover to allow them to flank their targets, and chainsaws strapped to their rifles to save on ammunition.

It's a mad world, this, innit?

Resident Evil 4

"I knew you'd be fine if you landed on your butt."

If there's one thing I know about the Resident Evil series, it's that Resident Evil 4 marks an incredibly important - indeed pivotal - moment. The switch from fixed cameras to an over the shoulder point of view. Finally, the gaming public would be able to play a survival horror title whose horror wasn't the controls.

This revolution wasn't enough to interest me to play it back in 2005. I had practically zero interest in anything Resident Evil, no matter how you were able to look at it, and in the decade and a half since that view has changed little. Well, no, I take that back, because I have seen some nice Resident Evil stuff thanks to this 1001 list, but I haven't dropped everything to carry on playing like I have with, say, Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War. Which must tell us something about my gaming tastes...

Leon S Kennedy is a man on a mission in a muddy brown Europe, one that we can see from all kinds of new and exciting angles. Where are the zombie dogs going to jump out at us from this time, eh? Their jobs just got a lot harder, that's for sure.

Transformers

Robots in Disguise.

I missed the Transformers bubble on account of being born too late. That doesn't make much sense when you go and look up the various iterations of Transformers and learn that there were other bubbles I could have found myself in during my childhood. It's more accurate to say that I avoid Transformers because I've very little interest in colourful chunky robots that turn into cars and cassettes and whatever else they disguise themselves as.

I've not seen the films, I've not watched the cartoons, and I've definitely not played Transformers, the PlayStation 2 action title that is supposedly the one and only Transformers game worth playing - at the time of the 1001 list, at least.

Autobots assemble, or whatever the call is.

Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne

"Everything had started out as black and white. Somewhere down the road, the line went blurry."

Max, you're back. You look a little different. Are you alright?

Video game sequels can bring on several changes, often improvements on the original titles, and Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne argues the case for not using your own development team as the stars of a gritty film noir.

Gone is the smirk - if you could call it that - of the original incarnation of our troubled cop, replaced with a face more befitting of a big sequel to a popular game. The graphics have gotten better, but what else is going on here that we've just got to play?

Zone of the Enders: The 2nd Runner

High Speed Robot Action

As a fan of Metal Gear and most things Mech, you'd have thought that I would be on board with Zone of the Enders, a space epic featuring orbital frames capable of destroying whatever stands in their way.

Its main selling point (arguably) was that it came with the playable demo of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, but I was quite happy to wait for a demo from elsewhere. I didn't need to buy a whole other game just to get my hands on it, and in truth, I probably wasn't as big a mech nut back then as I am now.

Z.O.E. wasn't met with massive acclaim but was rewarded with a sequel that did exactly what needed to be done in the form of Zone of the Enders: The 2nd Runner... and I've still not played that either. And yes, I own multiple copies of the series...

Let's see if we can change that.

Kill Switch

Take cover. Take aim. Take over.

Famous firsts usually aren't. They're often just more competent seconds, the design that had the publicity, the much-needed tweak to make something really work... Pong probably wasn't the first tennis game, but it's the first one you'll recall.

Gears of War wasn't the first cover-shooter, but (spoilers) it does the new genre better than Kill Switch does, which probably also wasn't the first cover-shooter, but it really is all this game has going for it (damn, more spoilers).

You are the all-American, one-man killing machine Nick Bishop, the video game action hero who finally learned how to hug walls and chest-high cover such that he doesn't get shot in the face. It is a monumental leap in military tactics, but what's actually going on here?

Metal Arms: Glitch in the System

Glitches in the Emulation, too.

There's a game for everybody, especially on the PlayStation 2, and if you were looking to control a dinky little robot with an arsenal of weapons, Metal Arms: Glitch in the System might just make it to the top of your list.

With third-person shooting and the ability to take over and remote control other robots, like the rather old school Paradroid, Metal Arms seems to tick a fair few boxes on the list of stuff we want to see in an action game.

But what's it about?

Freedom Fighters

In Soviet Russia, countries invade U.S.!

Source // Moby Games

When someone says 'Freedom Fighters', someone else replies 'Where's my sequel, IO Interactive?'

A lot of people care about this third-person shooter, set in an alternate history U.S. that has been invaded by the Soviets, full of squad-based firefights, guerilla-war style tactical approaches to crucial objectives throughout the city, and a literal underground resistance movement taking back the streets for the citizens.

If it's not the gameplay that fans love, and it's not the setting, then it'll have to be the music, sung by a Hungarian choir for that foreign feel. Something - maybe everything - about Freedom Fighters appeals to an entire generation of gamers that grew up with the PlayStation 2, Xbox, GameCube and PC, and I certainly count myself in that number. This game is excellent. At least that's what I remember it to be...

Has it aged well? Is it still worth demanding a sequel? Should it be left untouched, as a brilliant highlight of the past?

I am looking forward to firing it up again and finding out.