It Takes Two

Lebanese director Joseph Fares returns to us with his third release, which has always been all about cooperative play.

The game was developed by Hazelight Studio, founded by Joseph Fares in 2014. The game offers us a third-person adventure with elements that move the player from one platform to another. The game only allows the option of cooperative play, which means the style in which the game was developed, through split-screen play over network play. “Online” or “local” without, and owning just one copy of the game is enough to enjoy the experience with your friends like the previous one!

The beginning of the story revolves around a couple who turn into dolls after they want to break up for an unknown reason and from here the journey of “May” the wife and “Cody” the husband begins to break the magic by uniting with their daughter “Rose” who wants to keep them together, and they must overcome the obstacles and go to move to… their true bodies.

During your journey you will meet a book of love called “Doctor Hakim” and he will help you restore and repair this relationship. The writing style of the story is characterized as comedy and its integration into the game mechanics makes the experience unique, and that is what Joseph Fares wanted to achieve, namely to tie the events with the game mechanics in solving puzzles and other interactions between the spouses.

Fans of cooperative play will find a unique and diverse experience in game mechanics.

Each character has a different role, sometimes requiring you to cooperate, using the second character’s abilities to solve puzzles and advance to the next area. Playing with each character is a different experience. At the end of almost every chapter you will have weapons for both players and must use them together to complete some areas. This makes it a lot of fun to change playstyles as you play through the game until it’s over. One of the weapons I used was shots of a flammable liquid, and the other character has a weapon that causes them to explode. Some puzzles only required the use of fluid to push down the movement of some objects and facilitate the second player’s traversal movement. Sometimes you will have to blow up a barrier that you come across on your way by shooting together to clear the way, and you will see these ideas in a different way with the rest of the weapons available in this adventure.

An image that simulates the idea of ​​a split screen when solving puzzles between players.

Aside from the puzzles and moving platforms, there are some enemy and boss fights along your way, which add a bit of difficulty since each character has an energy meter.

If one of the characters runs out of energy, the game will allow you to recover one try, but if you lose all of them at the same time, you will return. To the last save point. We see a return to some of the challenges faced in the journey between players, “mini-games”, similar to the challenges that existed in the game A Way Out, adding further variety to the cooperative experience. The number of challenges was about 25, and sometimes you find them along the way or you have to find them to try them out. One of the challenges was a skating race between players to collect as many boards as possible on the way to the finish. Challenges provide a very entertaining part between players from time to time and are like “collectibles”.

Art style with a lot of detail in this adventure.

On a technical level, you will see a wide variety in the game’s environments and worlds, from interiors to trees, nature, snow and others.

It is characterized by having improved support for the new generation, reaching 60 fps+ on Xbox Series. In some cases the screen will be merged and controllable together for the two characters and you will see animated artistic paintings of what brings us this adventure presents. The game lasted about 14 hours and given its content and price of $40, it worked very well as a cooperative platformer with almost no repetition. It Takes Two has managed to highlight this type of cooperative gaming that we don’t see very often, and we hope it continues that way in the games to come.