Before undertaking any of these missions, you should invite some friends along for the Titan slaying; not because you’ll get some special in-game benefit from having them along, but more to help with the repetition of it all. Rather than one person grinding for material/money/experience, you can get a group together and knock it all out at once as everyone earns the same rewards for successfully completing a mission. Aside from being able to revive a fallen comrade should they be defeated and the Titans getting a little tougher the more players you add, the gameplay in co-op doesn’t change at all from the single-player, which is disappointing.
Even though the co-op mode was added into the game after release, it would be nice to see a little more done on this front (the co-op Musou attacks in Dynasty Warriors were always fun). Cutting through swaths of foes with a buddy has always been one of my favorite parts of Omega Force’s long-running franchise, but Attack on Titan’s combat discounts that as a possibility. Instead, the most satisfying co-op moments come from higher difficulty missions where you start to feel like you’re working as a team to take down a giant. That means, though, having to clear through all of the lower level stuff first, which is sometimes quicker when you go it alone.
Attack on Titan feels like a good way to end the summer before the onslaught of fall/holiday releases arrive. It’s a solid “b-tier” title with some interesting mechanics that work well as a fun diversion when a quick video game break is needed. It doesn’t innovate an existing genre or seek to redefine our preconceived notions of what an action game can be. It simply is, and that’s alright.
Tally’s Take
I approached Attack On Titan from a fairly different angle than Jason. I’m not a big Dynasty Warriors or Monster Hunter fan, but I was familiar with some of the source material with which the game is based on. Though I wouldn’t call myself a fan of the anime series, I appreciated some of the things the show did in its earlier episodes. So, while I was hoping for a high quality game that would really try to do well by its huge fanbase, I was expecting it to probably be yet another title simply cashing in on the IP.
The short way to describe my thoughts after spending some time with the game is that it was not as bad as I feared, but not as good as I hoped. I feared that the mechanics would be an unusable mess, but except for some small missteps that Jason mostly mentioned, the aerial movement and combat is solid. I hoped for the oppressive and grim atmosphere that gained the title so much attention in its early days, but I didn’t really feel that at all. The constant chatter of the characters (usually Eren talking about how he hates Titans and he’s going to murder them all; we get it) and the fact that Titans are falling left and right never made it seem like the humans had any chance of losing.
But the part that disappoints me the most about this game is that I felt like the developers were playing it too safe. I believe many players will already be familiar with at least some of the source material, so seeing very abbreviated versions of the major plot points just won’t be very satisfying for them. I wish Omega Force had chosen instead to tell a new story about a different group of soldiers. The objectives in both the single-player and the co-op modes also feel safe. The missions all boil down to kill X number of Titans at Y location, kill special Titan Z before an important building is destroyed, or something very similar. It all becomes quite repetitive, despite how satisfying the combat can feel at times. The crafting system is similarly uninspired and, while functional and easy to understand, there’s nothing new or exciting about it.
All in all, while there was nothing about the game that blatantly stood out as poor concept or design, there was nothing about the game that made me eager to play it again after I’d finished a session. Aside from the aerial movement and combat, there’s nothing here I haven’t seen dozens of times before, and the repetitive nature of the game doesn’t make that enough to make me want to revisit the game too many more times.
Our co-op review of Attack on Titan is based on the PlayStation 4 version of the game using a code provided to us by the publisher for review purposes.
Verdict
Co-Op Score
Overall
The Co-Op Experience: Up to four players can team up online to face the Titans together in Expedition Mode. These missions are separate from the main campaign, but all materials, experience, money, and gear earned carries over into the campaign. All players earn the same rewards for completing missions
Co-Optimus game reviews focus on the cooperative experience of a game, our final score graphic represents this experience along with an average score for the game overall. For an explanation of our scores please check our Review Score Explanation Guide.