One of the things that has been great when reviewing so many games, is when they’re set for co-op and play well enough to warrant my wife and I taking the plunge together. Granted, the list of ones that merit that hasn’t been terribly long, but it’s always refreshing when we hit a real winner. Operation: Tango is one of the tougher ones we’ve run into in terms of how it worked in practice playing it though, mixing together some great highs with some frustrating lows.

The concept is that you’ll play together on 2 separate systems (and there is no option to play this solo), each requiring an independent screen. The reason for this is that you’ll each play a distinct role, with one person as the hacker and the other as the agent in the field. As you can imagine, as the hacker you’ll generally be working through a variety of interfaces and screens, trying to do whatever you can on the back-end to assist and protect the agent. On the other side of the coin you’ll take a more action-oriented role, infiltrating, investigating, and working the hands-on angle. In order to be successful you’ll have to be in pretty much constant communication, as neither of you will generally know what to do. Instead, you’ll each need to look around for any clues you can find for what information you may need, whether a workstation ID, an access code, or any number of other things. It can be frustrating at times, but if you’re patient it can work out, and for some hope of a little help there is an in-game hint system, though it almost always told us things we’d already figured out.

Where it runs into trouble on a general level is that it makes some odd choices for how some of the controls you’ll need work. Sometimes you’ll get on-screen guidance telling you which button or stick to use (though I’ll note that if you’re playing handheld the text is quite small) to try to help, but more often than not when in doubt you just need to begin pressing everything to see what happens. What can be tricky is that the result may only be visible on the other player’s system, so it can be tough. For a few missions we got by and managed to survive, but on the game’s fourth mission we got incredibly discouraged. You’re simply bombarded with multiple issues at once, which wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t for some of the screens and things you need to do not being intuitive or explained at all. We literally swapped roles and controllers multiple times in the hope of figuring out why what seemed to be working on-screen simply wasn’t satisfying the game, but since there was no feedback on what to do, or what the remaining problem was, it immediately brought the positive energy and momentum we’d been building to a halt. By checking around a bit we were able to work out the problem, but by then our interest had really tanked hard.

The result is a game that can be a blast when it feels like it’s being fair, but a bit of a bummer when it feels like it gets in its own way. I understand the desire to make your tasks continually different, and to throw pressure your way, but given how little you typically know about what you need to do in order to proceed, additionally providing limited feedback when you’re obviously floundering feels a bit cruel. Certainly having a bit more consistency in what controls are used for tasks could have helped, or expanding the help system to include tasks that seem likely to frustrate people with more refined instruction, could have gone a long way to improving our experience. While it may not be perfect, it’s still an interesting and pretty exciting experience while it lasts, just try to be sure to go easy on each other when things inevitably get aggravating.