Game Review: It Takes Two

Every night my girlfriend and I play a couch co-op game on the Xbox for an hour or so. We end up playing Borderlands 2 and the Pre-Sequel quite a bit just because we love them. Diablo has been good. Older revisions of Black Ops that supported couch co-op were awesome. But generally speaking, the gaming world seems to be abandoning couch co-op play. They'll all tout how they support online multi-player but the point isn't to sit in two different rooms with two different consoles watching two different screens while we play "together."
 
My point is that despite how charming Scooter and Claptrap are, we are constantly on the lookout for new couch co-ops. So when we stumbled across "It Takes Two", we were encouraged. They recently had a sale and I think we got it for about $12 (It was released in 2021).
 
It started out great. The setup is kitschy--bickering couple forced to work together--but the gameplay is nice and breezy. You get magically shrunk down into dolls about three inches tall and you're forced by this overbearing package (I forgot exactly what he's supposed to be…big pink flat-looking package with a bow) to learn to cooperate. So you go through the house, inside the walls, into dead spaces, inside cabinets and machines, and are forced to solve puzzles collaboratively. Typically one of you has to man some switch or aim some hose while the other does some key activity.
 
As a guy who used to code user interfaces, I appreciated the design and playability of the game. There were visual affordances for the important stuff. It was generally intuitive. We played. It was good…until it wasn't. After a few set pieces, we were presented with a boss fight. Seriously, all of a sudden this sleepy collaborative cutesy game popped up a raving vacuum cleaner who launched flaming debris at our characters, killing them.
 
We spent a few minutes trying to figure out how we were supposed to fight the thing. We started to figure it out but then it turned out that when you die three times your progress is reset. Simply said, it wasn't fun. We were sold a discovery game and then thrown into a first-person shooter.
 
As we tried to fight this vacuum cleaner, we sorta-kinda figured it out but couldn't get the timing right. We were just getting hammered by that raging old piece of junk. After maybe five minutes of it, we agreed that we simply couldn't give a crap.
 
Remember those games where you were desperate to get through a boss fight? You had to in order to get to the cool _____ level or get the ____ loot or achieve the ____ story objective, right? This game has none of that. It was like going to a restaurant and being told that you had to dance really well if you wanted to eat there. Dance for us monkey. The fight was so lopsided, so unbalanced, that we simply walked away. The game simply wasn't good enough that we were willing to work that hard to satisfy it. It was more fun to run through Borderlands 2 for the fiftieth time than to endure It Takes Two anymore.
 
The vacuum cleaner lives or dies. We didn't care. The game has no actual goal. The characters had no attributes to improve or equipment to upgrade. We had no weapons but were expected to jump through some torpid engineer's idea of a boss fight. So rather than going online and learning the secret/trick to defeat the vacuum cleaner, we simply stopped playing, thankful that we didn't pay full price for this game when it came out.
 
So does that make this a 'bad' game? I have no idea, but it did make it one that we didn't care to spend our time on. We were sold one thing and delivered something completely different. It's been a pretty popular game, so obviously my opinion isn't reflective of the wider public's. If you do try it, make sure you get it on sale.