All Guns Blazing (Armed & Dangerous (Xbox))

Member Name: Wolfzilla

Product:	Armed & Dangerous (Xbox)
Date:	24/07/06 (108 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great fun, humour, Shark-gun

Disadvantages: Doesn't really do much original,a bit short maybe

I picked up a copy of Armed and Dangerous for the whopping sum of £4.99 just after Christmas, which put it at a quid cheaper than the UK's official XBox magazine, and I bought it amongst a slew of other games, so put off playing it for a while, until the other week when I got started at it and became hooked, which has meant that despite the fact I've since bought games like Knights of the Old Republic 2, they have been shelved in favour of completing this.

The story is simple, in the fantasy world of Milola, the King rules with an iron fist, despite the fact he is not the true King, whom he killed years ago, orphaning his young son.
The real Queen was also killed, but not before she cast a spell on the magical Book of Rule, a book of immense power, that could either grant the King his dark desires, or bring an end to his rule once and for all. The spell she cast was to ensure that nobody could read it, and through the years the story became that the spell was in fact cast by an eyeless wizard named Rexus.
Rexus adopted a young boy as a child, and named him Roman, now grown up, Roman is the leader of the Lionhearts, a ragtag group of robin-hood types who make trouble for the king. Assisting Roman in the group are Moleman Jonesy, whose home and kin were destroyed by the king flooding their mine-home and Q, a rogue royal battle robot who developed a personality, and addiction, after drinking a cup of tea.
The three plan to pull the ultimate heist and steal the Book of Rule, and go to find Rexus to help them, just as the King's troops are about to take him, after escaping, the Lionhearts begin their quest to retrieve the Book of Rule, setting in motion a chain of events that will lead to an ancient prophecy being fulfilled.

I may have made the story sound like a highly unoriginal and serious story, but the truth is, it is filled with plenty of humour, a lot of it being aimed squarely at Star Wars(this is a Lucasarts game), and is given a very British feel, with Jonesy being Scottish,Roman a cockney and Q a well spoken gentleman, while the enemy grunts are all clearly Irish, and even the use of words such as 'Ned' and 'Midden' thrown in definitely indicate a British presence in production.
But the story is actually good. While it may not be setting any new trends or genres in motion, in a rare occurance for a videogame, the humour actually works, and on more than one occasion I actually found myself laughing at some of the comments made by the characters.

The game is quite simply a third-person 3D shoot 'em up. That's it. The game is under no pretentions of what type of game it is, the goal is to blow stuff up with a variety of weapons. That's it. Oh, I forgot, there are actually a few segments where you go to first-person view to man turrets shooting down hordes of oncoming foes trying to scale a fortress. But the basic crux of the gameplay is a third-person shooter.
Not that this is a bad thing by any means, in these days of complex combat systems and puzzles, it's great to have a game where the idea is simple, but it's just a fun game to play, for decades now, one of the main staples of videogaming has been shooting stuff, from Space Invaders upwards, and this game decides to simply stick to formula of making a fun came that revolves around blowing stuff to bits.
So what sets it apart from your average shooter? the weaponry is awesome, not just for names like 'Guy Fawkes Traitor Bomb','the World's Smallest Blackhole' and the 'Vindaloo Rocket Launcher', but for the absolutely epic weapon that is the Shark Gun. This fire a 'Land-Shark', that swims through the ground like a Great-White through water, and jumps up and eats any enemies it encounters. You can fire two at once, and a battle where I fired off two and machinegunned into a horde of enemy grunts, as the sharks picked them off causing chaos, is truly a videogaming moment I don't think I'll ever forget.


Graphically, the game doesn't set any new standards, but there is no doubting that it looks good enough. The in game graphics are good, with the stages looking awesome and highly detailed, and the character models keeping up a solid standard. It's only in the cutscenes the the graphics falter a little, but not really enough for me to call them bad. The fact that some of the characters have a cartoony appearance also ensures that this can at times look more planned than poor.

The sound in the game is mixed. The music may be rather generic and uninspired, on the few occasions you get to hear it, but the voice acting is great. While I didn't recognise any of the names, Q's voice actor,Pat Fraley, voiced Krang and Baxter in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon, and all the other actors have contributed voices to various good games and animated series. The accents are spot on, and the voices just sound proper, this was one of the best voice acting performances I've heard in a videogame.

Controls are fairly simple to get used to.

A:Jump
B:Use Second Weapon
X:Reload
Y:Action
L:Zoom
R:Fire
Left Thumbstick: Move
Right Thumbstick: Aim

Response of them is spot on, and the control layout suited my tastes perfecly, so I cannot complain about the controls at all.

At the end of the day, while Armed and Dangerous doesn't exactly do anything at all to improve gaming on a whole, and with the aside of the Shark Gun, doesn't do anything new really, what it certainly does do is provide the gamer with a good few hours of enjoyable blasting action, and to be honest, you can't really ask much more of a game than to be entertaining, and that is one thing that this game does excell at being.

If you are a fan of simple shooters, that are just plain fun, and also sport a wicked sense of humour,then I would definitely recommend you check out this game, especially if you can find it at as low a price as I paid. Im giving this enjoyable slice of action gaming 4 out of 5, for simply being bloody fun.

Review originally posted at Epinions.com

Summary: Anyone who just likes fun shooters will lap up Armed and Dangerous