I Love The Smell Of Burning Plastic In The Morning.... (Army Men (GB))

Member Name: wampyrii

Product:	Army Men (GB)
Date:	16/09/01 (122 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: see review

Disadvantages: see review

Ahhh a game where you get to control those green plastic soldiers of your childhood against the tan plastic soldiers who were always their sworn enemy. Well ok, in my childhood the enemy was always grey, but then I suppose it depends who your countriy's enemy was - obvious the American's were against tan soldiers, we were up against grey...ermmm...

Well, colourisms aside, Army Men is a pretty decent game, not without its problems of course, but still pretty decent. You get to control 'Sarge' against the tyrranical Tan army. These missions are quite caried and may be a simple, rush in kill everything which doesn't move(the opposition are a little static) and get out, or rescure hostages, find documents...etc. In some you get to control more of your soldiers as you lead a team of crack troops into battle, and in others you even gets to command jeeps and helicopters in your quest - all good fun. The basic premise is though that if its tan coloured you kill it.

Amy Men shines in some areas and falls way short in others. Graphically it looks very nice, although sometimes the Tan army does seem to blend a little too well with the background and you find yourself being shot at by what looked like a rock...but then I suppose that could be called camouflage. There are numerous weapons and items to collect marked by crates with a letter on them and including bazooks, grenades, automatic rifles, minesweepers etc, all of which change the appearance of Sarge when in use. The intro to this game is rather gorgeous though and so full marks for that. Sound effect? Well in game they are pretty much non-existent other than a military drum chorus throughout and the standard weapon sounds. This is rather weak when the digitised sound effects that have been included are the best I have heard so far on the Gameboy. They are not limited to a single word either but you get whole sentence like "Ahhh a minesweeper. This'll come in handy". It
s a nice touch. There are over 15 single player missiuons to battle across and the replay value s quite high. There is also a two player option to be played via a link cable, although I am yet to try this out as yet, so I can't comment.

The only real gripe I have about this game is the control method. I hate dodgy controls on games and this has exactly the kind of thing which bugs me. Left and right on the directional pad move you forwards and backwards whilst up and down rotates you. This is annoying and often leads to you taking hits whilst you mess around rotating and correcting to get a decent aim. Dumb. Add to this that you often find yourself stuck on the scenery a la 8-but days(I thought this was a thing of the past game devleopers?!) and then struggling to rotate yourself off again and it all gets very annoying. You learn to deal with it after a while but its something which could have been easily avoided.

There are plently of nice touches here, but the fiddly controls put a damper on it for me. Hence the middling rating. Its quite good fun, but it doesn't really cut it against some of the better games of its type out there. A valiant attempt though.

Summary: