Is this the perfect co-op game? It takes two under the scope

It takes two under the scope: Is this the perfect co-op game? 

It Takes Two is the second pure co-op game from Hazelight Studios. His first work A Way Out caused a sensation almost three years ago, also because it could only be played in a coop. It takes two for PS4 / PS5 and Xbox consoles builds on this very basic idea, but comes with a significantly different setting and different tonality.

The eccentric studio manager Josef Fares took his mouth very full before the official release. Satte Fares promised 1000 dollars namely to all those who would bore the game. In the test for It Takes Two, we tried to get out of hell to bore ourselves. In vain. But we are quite honest: rarely did we care not to give up a lot of money.

But one after the other: It Takes Two takes us into the role of the couple Cody and May, who lives with their little daughter Rosie in a pretty house in the middle of a small outskirts idyll. But in the relationship between the two, the crisis is so violent that one day they decide to divorce.

When she tells Rosie the decision, she takes it almost stoically and withdraws into the shed of the house, where her grief overpowers her. Her tears fall on two small dolls, which curiously leads to Cody and May turning into exactly these dolls. Now the two have to try to return to the real world and with the help of couple therapist Dr. Hakim, who is actually a magical book, to fix her marriage.

A couple as a star in chaos

This hanger is of course the perfect premise for a both humorous and touching story, which proves to be a surprisingly strong element of the game throughout the game. The end is quite predictable, but the plot lives immensely from the relationship between the two main characters.

At first, Cody and May still cordon each other regularly, pointing out each other's annoying properties, only to pull themselves together more and more in the course of the game. They also discover long suppressed longings and secrets of the other, which makes the figures approachable and personable. In any case, Cody and May have grown extremely dear to us over the entire season.

The fact that the story works so well is also due to the fact that the two stumble into new, strange situations again and again and meet all sorts of funny NPC figures. Militant squirrels, for example, who want to kill a wasp nest. A hammer that helps Cody and May on their way.

Or a few frogs that act as mini-taxi companies and argue about who should now transport "the fat" ( Cody ). And Dr. Hakim, who gradually presents the disputed couple with different lessons for marriage rescue as a marriage kitter, simply has to be seen.

The perfect balancing act of wit and heart

All of this is presented with an extremely wide wink, humor and charm, but in places individual scenes really touched us. If Rosie tries in vain to get her parents - whose real, lifeless bodies lie on the couch and in the study like deep sleep - to think better and then withdraw disappointed, it is inevitably dear to the heart. All the more remarkable that the story of It Takes Two never loses its looseness, but never pushes itself too much. Because the real jewel of the game is different anyway.

A wonderful genre mix with crazy boss fights

As a pure co-op adventure, you experience It Takes Two either locally on the couch or online with another person in the split screen, who, unlike you, does not have to buy the game. Thanks to Freundespass, one and two zocks buy. That's how it has to be!

In a playful way, you can expect a mix of linear action adventure and 3D platformer, in which locations interwoven with each other are hopped, run, fought and puzzled by story technology. During their journey, Cody and May always get unique skills from the doll's hand from Hakim - you know, the speaking love book.

For example, Cody can shoot up to three nails where May is hooked over a deadly gorge. She herself is equipped with a hammer, which in turn opens the way for her husband by breaking glasses. In another passage, Cody is equipped with a honey cannon that places sticky nectar on wasps, which May in turn can explode with a match cannon. Elsewhere, Cody can transform into a large version of himself, while May can walk along walls with special boots.

And these different skills are of course used again and again in the course of the game for smaller puzzles, which often require pleasant tinkering: where exactly does Cody have to fire the nail, so that May can easily swing over the abyss? Or which button does one have to press so that the other does not rush against an obstacle?

As a form of gameplay loosening up, we are also caught up in boss fights at regular intervals. Mind you in completely crazy boss fights, in which not only the good old "wtf" has been washed over our lips.

Who could have guessed that we had to fight our oversized garbage swallow or that we had to defend ourselves against our tool case at lofty heights on narrow boards. The fights themselves are provided with extremely fair checkpoints, anything but hard chunks, but definitely not sure-fire successors, always with cooperative elements and one thing above all: creative and fun.

"It can't …"

At this point we come again explicitly to the points "changeover" and "independence". If you have so far been looking in vain for a reference to a comparable game, it is only because It Takes Two is so incredibly diverse and unique, as we have rarely seen in a co-op game.

The fact that we didn't get bored for a second, didn't get $ 1,000 from Josef Fares, is due to the almost incredible degree of variety and ingenuity. The basic structure of action adventure and platformer is only half the truth. At regular intervals we experience passages in which we can hardly believe our eyes.

In order not to spoil you too much, we take a very early example from the demo version: While Cody controls an airplane and May takes enemies under fire with the cannon, an enemy jumps out of the blue onto the wings of our propeller machine and turns the May Part into a street fighter fight. With life bar, power moves and spectacular K.O. screen.

And that's just one example of many in which It Takes Two opens a door and not only throws us into a completely different genre, but simply amazes us. The entire season is peppered with fantastic surprises, in which we have constantly considered what the developers will think of next, and who also quickly created a certain addiction factor. We couldn't get enough of locations like the inside of a tree or the detailed children's room of little Rosie and of course the many gameplay ideas that the developers had come up with for this.

Similar to A Way Out, Hazelight could have delivered a nice, linear co-op experience that comes with a neat Pixar look and keeps us going in terms of story technology. In the case of It Takes Two, however, they put two more shovels on it, let their creativity run free and even go with the mini-games and many optional interaction options that we discover in the areas, the extra mile. For his next knockout game, the team has set the bar extremely high.