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I'm a big fan of action movies. Give me lots of gunfire, some explosions and long, nonstop action sequences, and I'm going to like the movie.

Army of Two is the videogame equivalent of the action movies I like so much. It's one of the few games I've played where it made me think "oh, they made this game just for me."

Army of Two's campaign gives you a scenic tour of a few of the places around the world that U.S.-based campaigns are being fought, have been fought or may be fought. You play one of two mercenaries: Rios, a large, bulky guy, or Salem, the skinnier, skater dude. Rios is the one introduced first, but it seems like everyone I know gravitates toward Salem. Given how Rios seems to be a conspiracy theorist, and Salem is more likely to talk about the Wu-Tang Clan, I'll stick with Salem.

You actually don't start off as a mercenary in a private military corporation (PMC). Instead, Rios and Salem are partners in the U.S. Rangers, and after going through a short training course, they find themselves on the ground in Mogadishu, Somalia, in the early 1990s. They find themselves teamed with a PMC contractor to take out a warlord.

Despite the silliness behind this part (or, really, behind the whole conceit of the game), it's still a fun sequence to see how they start off, even if it did make a friend of ours, a former Ranger himself, laugh out loud. Soon after the Mog, Salem and Rios join the PMC and find themselves fighting their way into the caverns of Afghanistan just after 9/11. From there, they'll go to Iraq, to an aircraft carrier steaming for Manila, China, and eventually to Miami for a final confrontation that pretty much everyone playing will have seen coming a mile away.

Subtlety is NOT the strong point here, people. You're portraying hockey-mask-wearing, multiple-gun-wielding, heavily armored mercenary gods of modern warfare.

The writing is probably one of the more debatable points of merit in the game. A lot of people don't like it, and some feel that it shows a relative callousness toward the amount of people the mercs have killed when they joke around, or talk about Ghost-Faced Killa versus The RZA, or just play electric air guitar in celebration. It does, though, match up with a number of the familiar tropes and clichés of the action movie genre, and a lot of it hit my sense of humor and fun just right. In short, I liked it a lot, but I'm going to admit that it's not subtle or brilliant. It's just fun. For me. It might not be for you.

The gameplay is predicated around co-op play. That used to be a bigger deal than it is now, but at least in this regard, it's used to additional benefit. There are two ways this works: the concept of aggro, which anyone who has played a massive multiplayer online role-playing game probably already knows, and cooperative actions carried out by the two men.

Cooperative actions are fairly self-explanatory. If you need to get to a higher level, there will be sections in which the mercs can hoist each other up. One is pushed to the higher level, where inevitably (it seems) he'll have to take out a few bad guys, and then he reaches down and pulls his partner up. In other places, you'll parachute down together, one controlling the 'chute while the other uses a sniper rifle on the enemies below, or you'll use your sniper rifles simultaneously to take out objects or sentries.

You'll also be able to revive each other. If you take enough damage, you're not down and out, but instead, you fall to the ground, dazed. You can sit and still shoot, but you can't move, though your buddy can drag you to a safe space and revive you.

In other points, you'll go "back to back" — time slows down, and your ammo is unlimited as you spin around, taking out attackers in a 360-degree radius.

Aggro is the other way the two characters work together.

As you shoot at the enemies, you tend to attract attention. By using the D-pad, you can tell your partner to either attract attention to himself by shooting a lot, assaulting, etc., or you can tell him to hold tight while you get all the enemies' attention on yourself. This has two benefits: One, if you or your partner is wounded, it gives him time to heal some, and two, it allows one player to gain the aggro.

Aggro is designated by a gauge at the bottom of the screen as well as some on-screen changes to your character. If you start to glow red, you're gaining aggro. If you start to turn transparent, your partner has it.

What's the good in that, you may ask.

Well, if you have all the aggro, you can go on a rampage. Your ammo is unlimited, and you do extra damage and take less damage while time slows down. At the same time, the partner with no aggro will turn invisible and gain a speed boost. He doesn't have as many attack options, but he can quickly dispatch enemies from behind.

You can control to a degree how much aggro you get by how you customize your guns. Each mission earns you money, and you can use that money to buy new weapons and customize them. For instance, installing a suppressor on a gun will lower the damage it does as well as the amount of aggro it gains when firing. On the other hand, pimping it out — covering it in gold and silver and "bling" — will be so audacious that the enemy will be enraged at that, gaining more aggro for you. You carry two "primary" weapons: a long arm of some sort (such as an assault rifle or shotgun) and a sidearm, such as a small submachine gun. You also carry one special weapon, which starts as a sniper rifle but also can be a rocket-propelled grenade or Stinger missile.

One of the downsides of the game is the fact that it uses a checkpoint save system. If you've read any of my reviews, you've seen how much I hate them. However, in this case, it actually plays OK. The checkpoints are numerous and not far apart, meaning that you're only rarely too far away from one, and you don't have to finish an entire chapter to save the game.

The camera controls and character controls, being that this is a third-person shooter, are pretty solid, too. It was rare that I had an issue seeing what I was doing, though I did have some problems at times with the enemies being able to turn and fire faster than I seemed to be able to do.

The graphics are solid and good. I didn't see a lot of issues with them and the art worked for me. The global positioning system that shows you the way to go helps a lot, though it doesn't overlay well with "the real world" — and isn't always perfect in and of itself. I often found it easier just to tell my partner to advance and then follow him.

The enemy artificial intelligence was impressive. Enemies flank, throw grenades, take cover and generally remain a pain in the butt even on the easier levels. You out-gun and out-man them in almost every way for the most part, even the bosses; the only enemies that really are much of a threat are the "armored" ones who can be hurt only from behind. These feel almost more like a kludge to force you to fight a certain way and are usually more annoying than actually dangerous.

The audio was good, if repetitious. Every time you tell your partner to do something, he'd respond with one of about two different things, so it could get quite old listening to it. The voice acting was fine; it just got boring.

In short, like the campaign — which isn't long at all — Army of Two is a fun little game. This is not a game for deep political analysis or thinking, but rather just the fun of running around, shooting it out with bad people. It's not politically correct and seems to revel in that fact a bit at times, but if you're looking for a good "let's blow stuff up" kind of game, it's worth your time (though perhaps only as a rental, given its overall length).