The problem with Army of Two: 40th Day isn't that it's bad. It's that so many other shooters are good. This is one of those outdated corridor shooters that would have thrown us into paroxysms of delight as recently as five years ago. All these nifty flanking tricks, and scripted moments for mock surrenders and hostage rescues, and the co-op gameplay, and the fiddly weapon customization! Man, what a year 2005 would have been!

But how does it play in 2010?

The fact of the matter is that the genre has passed these scripted corridor shooters. As I plow from one set piece to the next, I realize that in order to endure a guided tour, I really need a hook. A story. Cool characters. A twist. Nifty art design. BioShock, Call of Duty 4, and Resident Evil 5 got away with it. Army of Two: 40th Day can't. If I'm going to play a middling shooter, I'd just as soon do it in some sort of open world. There were times during Army of Two that I pined for The Saboteur instead. Mediocrity is slightly better in an unfettered environment.

The hook here is the co-op, but co-op is no longer a substitute for a good game. We have Resident Evil 5, Saints Row 2, Left 4 Dead, Killing Floor, Halo 3: ODST, Gears 2, and various other options for solid and memorable co-op. But Army of Two builds the game around co-op, rather than building a solid game and then introducing co-op.

For instance, this is a game obsessed with flanking. One player builds up aggro, clearly displayed on a meter at the top of the screen. Then the other player works his way around to the side because the AI is now ignoring him. This is reflected in the level design, the mini boss fights, and the AI (it works fine as a solo game thanks to a few simple commands you can give your AI partner). Flanking is the cornerstone in Army of Two, which is otherwise just another cover-based shooter where you wait for the AI to pop its head out. Gearbox's Brothers in Arms games had a similar conceit, and you can see how far it got them.

Electronic Arts tosses a few additional gimmicks into the mix, but none of them is terribly effective. Hostage rescues shoehorn a bit of optional and uninspired stealthing into the action. At particular moments, you make morale choices such as whether to free the puppy or shoot the puppy in the head. These are about as clumsy and contrived as the choices in Infamous, but with the added value of being in M-rated questionable taste. There's a lot of weapon upgrading and customization, which feels like it was lifted directly from one of EA's Need for Speed games. But Army's of Two's Frankenstein guns seem hardly worth the bother. Tabbing through six types of muzzles for an extra hash mark in my handling rating? No thanks. I'm just here for the loud gunfire.

Multiplayer is mostly shrug-worthy except for one important point. You have to buy the horde mode in which you and other players hold off waves of attackers. That's right, you paid for the game, and now you get to pay again for one of its multiplayer modes. It'll be released for free in thirty days, but until then, consider it an additional fee if you want to partake. Think of it as a tip. A gratuity. A little sumthin' sumthin' to EA because they made for you this fine game. Suffice to say, this is among the tackiest money grabs I've seen from EA, a company known for its tacky money grabs.

(UPDATE: Reader David Boy points out that this isn't a cash grab, but a pre-order grab. It seems that EA isn't even selling horde mode, which was offered as a pre-order incentive. So while it's a bit tacky to withhold a significant chunk of gameplay, it's not quite so tacky as selling it separately a la Resident Evil 5's versus mode.)

The tone of Army of Two is really weird. In its only memorable level, a ruined zoo with a big dead elephant you can use for cover, Army of Two make jokes about both having sex with and shooting pandas. This is, after all, a light-hearted humorous game about Shanghai devastated by terrorist attacks that collapse skyscrapers, bring down jetliners, and kill thousands of people, and then wants to confront you with the morality of killing a lot of terrorists. That's a tough one, huh? And you have to deal with this at the point when you're deciding whether to let a soldier rape a woman for $50,000. If you do decide to allow the rape, don't worry. No such thing happens. Instead, the woman is simply murdered. Phew. Fortunately, even though Army of Two is too squeamish to allow an actual rape, it still intends to be provocative when it comes to murdering children and protecting endangered species, both moral choices you'll have to confront.

Gears of War made it fashionable to scootch refrigerator sized dudes through levels crammed full of little obstacles and narrow doorways, tumbling from cover spot to cover spot in a succession of flanking puzzles. That's pretty much all you're left with here. It's decent enough, I suppose, when my character's bulging neck or bicep isn't in the way of what I'm trying to shoot. The guns are loud, the deaths are myriad, the graphics are fine, and everything's better in co-op. It's even got split screen co-op if you want to share your TV real estate with a local friend. Just remember that the key to Army of Two is keeping at bay the nagging sensation that you might as well be playing Resident Evil 5 or Gears of War 2.