A Review: Armorines: Project S.W.A.R.M, N64 1999

Armorines: Project S.W.A.R.M. is a first-person shooter for the Nintendo 64, developed by Acclaim Studio London and published by Acclaim Entertainment. The game plays like most other first-person shooters, with the player taking on the role of either Tony Lewis or Myra Lane and then leading them through a series of missions to halt an insectoid-like alien race from invading Earth. The story for this game came from a comic book series by Valiant Comics, which Acclaim Studios had purchased not long before work on Armorines began.

Despite how this game did with critics and reviewers of the time, I didn't think that it was all that bad, to be honest; in fact, I quite liked it. It did well, in my opinion, as a simple run-n'-gun action game and seemed to scratch an itch for me that I didn't know I actually had. The plot was a little too loose at times, but I thought that it worked well enough to tie this game's various missions and segments together. There were some level bugs and breaks that bothered me, and too many times enemy units either fell through the world or just appeared out of nowhere, but I didn't find myself caring too much. I did find that some of the mission-end and objective triggers failed too, which required a level restart, which was frustrating. Yet again, I didn't really care; the game was very simple, and I just liked it for what it was, warts and all. I liked the boss battles and thought that they were fairly well balanced with the rest of the game. The weapon selection was nice and varied, with some cool effects given to them, though I did think that ammo and health drops could have been spaced a little better. As trying to scrabble around looking for item pick-ups got old quickly, so did having to backtrack to somewhere because you thought that you remembered when an item drop was. Otherwise, this was a fairly good, well-paced little shooter game; at least I thought so anyway.

Visually, I thought that this game wasn't too bad either. It looked fairly standard for an N64 game, and while it could have been prettier, it wasn't hideous by a long shot. The levels looked pretty good, and the various buildings and structures were nicely drawn and detailed. The various alien creatures were okay; some of them lacked depth or had flat features, but I can't complain too much. The minimap looked okay; I would have preferred some more details, but it wasn't completely useless, and the general interface was neat and tidy. The bosses looked pretty cool, and the blood and such when they took damage was clear and clean. Weapons fire was nicely done and varied between the different ammos that could be used, and I liked the background and world environments too.

Overall, this game was decidedly average, but I liked it.

5/10 – Okay! 

Signed Off – Leonardo – PSJ

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