What follows is a series of sketched panels hand-drawn by established comic book artist, Chris Bachalo, probably best known for his work on Marvel’s X-Men comics. We get to see JB walk away into the sunset to enjoy a life in retirement on a tropical island. Presumably we’d have seen his brains shoot across the screen in a rainbow coloured shower had we chosen to kill him instead.

After the slow pace of the first level, the second is a genuine rollercoaster of thrills that sees us caught amid Shanghai’s toppling skyscrapers. And yet, as mortar shells tear through the sky, blasting towering structures into smouldering heaps of rubble, we still find the time to play a quick game of rock, paper, scissors, strum our guns like guitars (rocking out while throwing up the horns of course) and generally push and shove one another about. No other game allows you to make light of such widespread death and devastation with an impromptu man hug or a high-five.

Navigating our way through the crumbling shells of Shanghai’s office buildings, we encounter countless enemies, each armed with differing levels of bulletproof armour requiring varying tactics to overcome. Hostage situations require stealth if you want to successfully rescue the innocents and gain yourself some positive morality points in the process and happily, there’re a variety of ways to do so.

There’s the easy way – grab the highest-ranking officer and force his underlings to surrender. Or there’s the slightly harder way – wandering into the area in mock surrender, dropping to your knees only to then quick draw your weapon in slow-motion and pick off the bad guys one by one. It’s the riskier strategy, but it doesn’t half look cool.

Successfully dealing with these events and completing various objectives earns Salem and Rios cash, which you can then spend on pimping out your weaponry. You can bring up the customisation menu at any time and there’s a whole host of add-ons and upgrades to apply to each of your three carried guns. By the end of our hands-on, we had a fully upgraded, urban camo sub machinegun, a zebra-striped silenced sniper rifle with a brand new stock and a gold pistol. However, our funds could never quite extend far enough to afford the ludicrous gold, diamond-encrusted hand grenade that explodes in a shower of bling when you throw it. That’s $100,000 to you, sir.

Our two level demo ends after winding our way down the side of a falling tower block, where we’re the greeted by a fully armoured man mountain with a chaingun who has to be flanked in order to leave his back exposed, allowing one of us to pump rounds into his ammo pack. Here, the aggro system from Army of Two 1 comes into play, and is noticeably more sensitive than before making careful planning more important. Cars explode all around us as we attempt to draw a bead on the weak spot, but once the big lug turns, we plough enough hot lead into his back to set him alight and send him packing.

At almost two hours, our time with the new Army of Two has been absorbing, entertaining and above all fun. We’ve been lauded for our superb sniping skill and condemned for our “sick” corpse mutilation (you put in a stomp button, we’re going to stamp on heads) by a supervising member of the EA Montreal dev team, but when we grudgingly leave a warm chair wanting more, you know that Army of Two: The 40th Day has to be on to a very good thing indeed.

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