Hi my name is Niall #zaceron
Army men is a very weird franchise that is perfect for making a game series about. Which is exactly what 3do did for better, or worse. The concept is stupidly simple. Green american plastic soldiers fight tan soldiers that look identical, sometimes grey ones and blue shows up as well. The series starts off with animated war times propaganda videos, before throwing the player into a pre rendered world of plastic men murdering each other. Just like children does in a sandbox. Eventually a portal is opened up to the real world and toys are brought into the mix. Because giant laser beam firing teddy bears is the natural enemy of toy soldiers after all.
The thing most people recall is that one level that takes place in a kitchen, where the soldiers can melt into molten goo on a frying pan. Flamethrowers also do this job really well, it is not a war crime if there is no Geneva convention.
Losing usually plays a defeat video, where the soldier is peeling potatoes and looking depressed, or other maniacal downers. Remember to peel your meal!
The Tan army is led by a mustache twirling evil man named Plastro, an evil toy that is an amalgamation of various despot stereotypes.
The two first games are fun but seriously flawed. Essentially the camera is fixed, but the player can roll, crouch and go prone, which is very frustrating. Eventually they condensed the experience into army men 3d, a third person shooter on the PlayStation. Which works well enough, is competently made and fun, despite the amount of junk information and obviously cut content. Seriously, who thought it would be a good idea to spawn pickup crates out of bounds? The biggest issue I personally have with the series in general are the numbers of escort missions. The only reason I could complete anything in army men 3d was being able to park the VIP in a corner, then clear out the map.
Eventually 3do churned out more games in the series which all suffer from various levels of quality. Such as the fairly fun and frantic army men air attack. Where the player is a helicopter pilot picking up things and dodging incoming enemy fire. The last boss on the other hand was just a chore and I said no more of this.
Sarges heroes that did an attempt at making them all look like action movie heroes and act like stereotypes. It worked fairly well and many people have found memories of said games.
If their attempt at telling a decent story worked, or not is purely subjective however, I will give them an A for effort.
However it was quite clear that the model quality began to notably drop a lot. The overall polish went down the drain along with the graphics and game play. For some reason they decided it was a good idea to make a on rail shooter, starring a super soldier made from DNA from heroes. It is a rather rubbish game where I have to run in circles to avoid enemy fire, while aiming roughly in the right direction of an enemy hoping to hit them. The RTS game was apparently just fine, only ever tried a demo of it.
Music is the worst and most disappointing aspect of the whole series, if they’re not using classic music loops, they’re mangling war film themes from decades past, or it is just some random thirty second music drop. A stark contrast to the fairly decent sound effects that serves their purpose.
It is quite clear that at some point it all became an uninspired attempt at milking the brand until the company eventually went under. The concept of non descript plastic people waging war is not a bad one and really makes modelling simple, since every model just need a shiny plastic texture. The one thing 3d has always emulated really well. Njål Signing out
