Army men

Format : PC, PSX

Review by : Crazy Review

Players : 1 - 4

Type : Action

On the box it says "Real Combat, Plastic men." Sounds promising. You load up the game and you have 2 options boot camp which is training and to start the game proper. I'll start with the boot camp. This is pretty pointless, when you get going you go around an arena and use each of the different weapons to blow up cardboard enemies also there are vechiles to practise driving, why then is this pointless, surely doing all this stuff will help you in some way??

Well yes and no, yes it does help you and no because once you complete the shooting/driving sections nothing happens, you sit there waiting for a possible well done screen but no nothing happens, you run around checking your done everything and thats it, so you end up having to press escape to get back to the main menu to start the game proper which is stupid and pointless. It does have its fun points, I mean using the radio to call in back-up and have extra men parachute in (which you don't need them) so running them over with a tank or using the flame thrower and watching them melt is funny and listenning to them shout "We have a man down!." Or is that just being cruel? When you use an item to make enemies to appear they seem to appear off screen and running to them only to find them on a cliff and a fence blocking them so you run to get some genades or a motar only to come back finding them gone is annoying and pointless. The boot camp is great for honing your skills but lacks any real accompishment once completed.

Now for the main game. There are 4 different areas Forest, swamp, mountains and desert. You start at desert and ending with forest. Lets me tell you the plot before we go any further. You play a sargent in the green army called funnily enough sarge. You are battling the Tans who also have help from the blues. The graphics are detailed, crisp and smooth and suit the game nicely, the whoile game runs very smoothly with no signs of any 'slow-down'. The missions vary from plain old blow the living shit out of them to stealing important keys to open a gateway like in that movie Stargate, which...Oh wait I don't want to spoil it for you. Theres a search and rescue to protecting your troops.

The missions are challegning and can be fun when using the flame thrower and watching those tan forces melt while shouting to yourself "Die, Bastards, Die!" or is that just me? The game is played from a sort of overhead camera angle but not quite, actually I'll say about 45 degree angle. Your man sarge can roll, duck, run, shoot etc and can also control troops but you don't have much control over them you just tell them to shoot (but they do it automatically anyway) stay where they are or defend a particular place. Some of the misions you might find repetitive while most are fun to play there are those occasonalk few that you think to yourself "didn't I do that in mission xx" There are about 30 missions in the game and will take a few months to complete but it is well worth it.

The FMV is good and in the old news style with those old black and white cameras. The music is well..err....what music..there is no in-game music which you can hear, not that you will be paying any attention if there was. As for the sound FX, its great with screaming enemies as they melt into a puddle as you scream with laughter.

You can't save in-game so if you f**k up then you'll have to do it again, mainly with that mountain mission where you have to keep up with and protect a truck but everytime to do keep up with it it either runs you over by accident or an enemy tank does which is annoying! And there's a stupid screen that pops up when you die is also annoying, some stupid message pop up in the corner and after spending several hours playing the game the most annoying voice ever says "Sarge is dead" like you already didn't know that. If you don't decide to repeat the level then 2 FMV endings show, the first is your grave (if you die during the mission) or you see yourself peeling potatoes (if you fail the mission objective e.g let troops die if your were supposd to protect them etc).

The multiplayer missions are poor and are standard in almost very other multiplayer game these range from capture the flag to kill xx number of opponents to win. Also I noticed that when you do play online it is very unfair, what I mean by this is that you'll find that one of your opponents very close to an air raid item and to be honing in for a kill only to find being bomb by the over flying plane, which is totally unfair, especially during capture the flag where your defending your base and they air raid you, you die and end up coming back in another part of the arena miles away from your base and everyone else's which gives your opponent an easy chance to steal your flag get back to their base and win. This is the only bug that I have noticed during the multiplayer but I heard from other players that you can choose a map which doesn't have air-raids on it (which I haven't found yet)

Overall I feel this is a great game with some excellent gameplay which is let down by some repetitve missions and lacking dencent multiplayer missions.

Sound         : Good sound FX but no in game music

7/10

Gameplay    : Excellent but missions can get repetetive

8/10

Difficulty     : Some levels can be trickier than others

7/10

Graphics      : Detailed and smooth

8/10

8/10

Overall         : A good game let down by repetetive missions

Review by : Crazy Review