You and me against the world

I've been a regular viewer of Zero Punctuation for quite a while now. I mean who isn't? It's fun to see Yahtzee tear into game and have the balls to say things that seem to escape the view of other game critics. I've also had the pleasure to meet Yahtzee and got him to sign my walkthrough of Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess.

Anyway his latest review, Dead to Rights: Retribution, brought forth an interesting point: The moments when the player is controlling Shadow are far more interesting than when the player is controlling Jack Slate. Now, I won't say that Yahtzee's opinions have that great an influence on my perception towards games in general but what I see is a classic case of squandered potential.



Dead to Rights: Retribution seems to part of a recent clutch of games based on the concept of 'two dudes taking on a whole army' (or in DtRR's case one dude and a dog). Other such games of this caliber include Army of Two and Resident Evil 5. Both games however seemed to have stumbled in executing this concept with dodgy AI no real sense of uniqueness between the characters being controlled.
That being said, there is only one game I have seen to have done this concept the best and that's the Chaos Engine: A game released in 1993 on the Amiga (later ported to the PC, Megadrive and SNES). It works as follows: The player works in team of two with another human or the computer. The player(s) selects a team of two mercenaries from a group of six and they go mow down a bunch of mutants. The thing is, each mercenary has they own unique weapon and set of abilities. Sure there are three sets of stats between the three but they develop in their own unique way. Sure some abilities are shared by characters but that's at different points in the game. The point is, the two player mechanic works because the characters are unique and only by working together can victory be achieved. Even in one player mode, the player still has a degree of control over what abilities are used by the team itself. It also encourages careful thought into what mercenaries are selected, based on what they can do and their rate of reliability in the battlefield.

In short, the two player mechanic can work when the AI is reliable enough and the two characters each have a degree of uniqueness that, when combined, can succeed. As indicated above, it can be done so there's really no excuse.



So what would I have done in Dead to Rights: Retribution? I would've had the player control Shadow and have Jack being controlled by the computer/2nd player. I mean think about it: Here, we have a team of two who have unique approaches to solving a problem. They play completely differently and it may offer an interesting spin on how the story is told: Through the eyes of Shadow.

And hey, there's nothing wrong with controlling a dog: Just look at Okami.