Army of Two: The 40th Day

Essentially an option to draw fire while your partner advances and flanks the enemy, Aggro brings an excellent tactical slant to the slaughter, smarter and faster-paced than the rather tedious suppress mechanics of the Brothers in Arms games, and boosted with AI that can actually pick its way through the terrain fairly smartly if you're playing solo. Elsewhere, a smattering of carefully placed civilians make for nice set-pieces too, as rooms filled with terrorists become puzzles while you work out how best to take down the baddies before they kill their hostages or call for reinforcements.

Regular moral choices - not the freshest of inclusions, granted - add yet another welcome element. Early on you'll be asked to decide whether or not to obey orders and off the nice NPC who's been walking through the tutorial, and it's rather a poignant moment - he taught you how to crouch and everything! Now you're going to pop a cap in him just because sexysexy voiceover lady tells you to? (In co-op, however, the fact that such beats play out with a fastest-finger-first mechanic may replace the weighty soul-searching with outright griefing - possibly no bad thing in itself - oh, and I totally killed that guy by the way.)

Enemy AI has had a bit of a boost too, even on the game's simpler settings, with foes taking cover intelligently and often trying to draw you out into the open. There are plenty of nice little touches to be seen as your targets help each other over walls, or bunch up around corners, and the cumulative effect of such moments is to create some enjoyably tricksy encounters.

And while it's not the prettiest game in the world, EA Montreal has captured the polluted haze of Shanghai quite stylishly, recreating the bloom and smog of a city where the air is so toxic just stepping off the plane once cured a nasty eye infection I had been battling helplessly for weeks (presumably by blanketing me in a smothering muddle of good ol' plutonium fumes). Early on in the game you'll be treated to a lovely skybox as the Pudong skyline rents itself into burning chunks, and the game's tangle of warehouse interiors, wobbly rooftops, and alleyways have a sharp cartoon detailing to them, and are drawn with plenty of colour.

Missions move quickly between objectives, and while there's a certain degree of clunkiness to proceedings - contextual prompts are often slightly laggy, and co-operative manoeuvres like wall-boosts and door-tugging are presumably included more for their ability to disguise loading than to generate fun or camaraderie - the co-op at the heart of it all has the capacity to work a certain kind of magic, turning an enemy turret into a spatial problem to speedily ponder and solve, while providing a level of partner AI which means you can trust it to understand your handful of simple commands and actually get you out of tight spots if you're playing the game alone.

Army of Two: The 40th Day has plenty of little tweaks and changes, then, but the central appeal of the game is still tightly bound up with the unexpected pleasures of flanking - holding off an enemy while your partner gets the drop of them, or sneaking to the perfect sniping point while he takes all the heat for you. It's a signature move that never fails to cheer you up when it goes according to plan, and the core of a game that perhaps had more of a brain lurking behind the metal faceplate than many people gave it credit for.