From the creators of Brothers and A way Out. They basically continue the idea of making coop focused games like in A Way Out, but this one is being received a lot better:
It’s $40 on Steam and it has a friend pass system where only one player has to pay for the game, the other one can download it for free and be invited into the party.
(and Overwhelmingly Positive in Steam user reviews)
I’m playing it with my niece and it’s a great game! Very good graphics and performance, delicious coop experience with constantly changing mechanics and imaginative situations.
Some review are criticizing the husband and wife fighting in a divorce situation as the weak part, but hey, my niece is making me skip those parts, so I can’t weigh in :P
I like the sound of this game (and I really like co-op games in general) but A Way Out left such a bad taste in my mouth that I think I’m just going to wait on this and see what folks think before I think about playing it myself.
I listened to a videogame podcast (Besties) in which they outlined the theme and storyline after the two of them played it together. I realize laying out in that format versus playing can convey two completely different experiences. The treatment of divorce and just the description of what happens with the parents and some of the other narrative REALLY turned me off, but that could also be my current state of mind. :)
Yeah, the Besties were really NOT complimentary about the way the theme worked in the game, and said that while a lot of parts of the game were fun, there were also a lot of them that wore thin quickly. It does sound like it’s really varied in the kinds of co-op challenges it gives you.
I still think Brothers is a masterpiece, and I’m always excited when a studio tries something very specific and unusual like two-player co-op… But I’m just not sure that this team is quite able to chew what it tries to bite off.
This game is fucking unbelievable and incredible and I cannot say enough good things about it.
I’ve played with a friend for 5-6 hours total across 4 sessions and every 60-90 minute session is so packed with innovative ideas, beautiful scenery, and pure fun, more than some entire games. We’re in chapter 3 of 7 so far.
Every 10 minutes you’re doing something new, executed so well, i just shake my head over and over again wondering how this team pulled off such a game in only a few years since their last (especially with one of them happening during a pandemic)
I get that the story might immediately turn some people off, but if you can push past it you’ll find a genuine game of the year candidate that people will be talking about for a LONG time.
I liked Brothers and A Way Out, but It Takes Two is such a tremendous improvement in every way.
By the way - even if neither you nor friend own the game, you can still play the first 90 minutes for free with the buddy pass download.
The gameplay here looks pretty fun, but yeah, the theme looks like a big downside. I generally play co-op games with my wife and/or kids, and telling them “hey, let’s go play a game about a family breaking apart!” would be a hard sell, to say the least.
Wow, does this game looks good. Very high bar in the visual art, despite having very varied zones. The lightning is great, like the materials, in special the game looks superb in a 10 bit color monitor as it has lots of colored lightning creating gradients on screen.
And funny thing, being so varied gives me the impression the game is longer than it is. I think I played 4 hours or so, but it feels as if I had played more than 5 hours, minimum.
Favorite moments so far? The monkey boss fight was great, piloting the plane outdoors was cool, the Diablo clone part was a nice surprise.
Dumb question: does the buddy pass allow you to share the game with just one person, or can the owner invite more than one person? For example, could I buy this and play through it with a buddy, and then play through it a second time with my kid?
I’m sure they could fit it onto Switch, but it would take a lot of work. Some of the environments are absolutely massive, with no loading times, and lots of fast motion taking you between areas and thus leaving little to no time to quickly stream new assets into memory.
I’m playing it on Series X and it’s honestly one of the best-looking games I’ve played on the system.
The game part is really good and fun, but oh my God, this game has the absolute worst cutscenes I have ever seen. Just truly disastrous, and there are a ton of them, and they are long. I mean, the characters are charmless, the vocal acting is bad, the animation acting is completely perfunctory, there’s a talking book for some reason that has an accent that’s somewhere between irritating and truly offensive, and it’s just one crude, shouty, top-of-their-lungs scene after another. All unskippable!
I get why people like the theme of the game, and they’re right – it’s not a good theme for a game that otherwise is perfect for parents to play with children – but I don’t think there is any possible theme that could survive execution this terrible.
Why do games like this even bother with cut scenes? I mean, the story is so simple, it could have all been done with incidental dialog while you’re actually playing the game. They obviously didn’t have the budget or the core competency to do it right, so why not just cut the whole thing? There’s a part of the game that they clearly know how to do very very well, and another part of the game that they just can’t do at a professional level. So don’t do it! Save the money! Baffling.
