A Review: Army Men 3D, PSONE 1999
Army Men 3D is a 3D shooter developed and published by the 3DO Company and released exclusively for the PlayStation One. Play is much like the other Army Men games, but this time around it is fully 3D. Allowing the player to take a Green Army soldier known as 'Sarge' and battle against the evil Tan Army through a series of missions with your trusty rifle.
I wasn't all that impressed with this game, and I found it to be dull and repetitive. I thought that this game lacked substance and that it was very much bare bones. It was like the 3DO Company was playing it safe, and as this is their first game to reach home consoles, I can understand why. That doesn't mean that I can let the various issues I found go though. A common problem for the Army Men games is the controls and responses. Once again, the game responds to player inputs sluggishly, and at times you can be forgiven for pushing the directional button a little bit too hard in an attempt to get your character to turn faster. There is no allowance for this when fighting, and as such, it makes snap decisions and precise firefights an impossibility. It more often than not comes down to getting the jump on the enemy characters and blasting them as quickly as possible, hopefully before they do the same to you. That in itself presents another challenge for this game, and that is the abysmal auto-aim. It suffers from problems when there is more than one target, bouncing between them until either the player dies or one of the AI's does. Then comes another problem, and that is using the game's 'down sights' to aim for more precise shooting. It is just slow and sloppy to use, and it never quite seems to get the player's inputs correct. Needing constant inputs and jabs and then missing anyway, no matter how much you try. I felt that the plot was M.I.A. and didn't make much sense at all; it tied the levels together okay, but wasn't at all fleshed out or even that good. As a result, it just turned the game into a series of run-and-gun stages with little to no meaning. The ending was just out of left field and made no sense to me at all. Why was I fighting in a graveyard with ancient ruins? What was the point of that? It was either that the end was lazily slapped on or that it referenced things from other games in the series that you had to have played to understand. Either way, I didn't like that this game seemed to be missing some plot points or possibly even some story text.
I thought that the graphics were very plain and basic, even for the time. This game looked dated and old upon release and seemed to age like out-of-date milk. Everything was rendered with jagged lines, square sides, low-resolution skins, or smeared over stretched textures. Almost every object, vehicle, and interactible was just a variation of a square or rectangle and looked bad. The trees and other world objects were simple one-dimensional sprites that rotated with the camera to give the illusion of being 3D. Sarge was just a basic soldier model and looked nothing like he does in Sarge's Heroes or the later games, which I thought was weird. I didn't like the HUD either and felt that it was far too basic, with nowhere near enough information for the player. The health indicator being a soldier model that chips bits off when hit was just unnecessary to me; it felt like it was just needlessly flashy, and I would have preferred a simple numerical counter instead. The colours were dull and dreary, and they all seemed to be shades of the same three primary choices. Though I did like the partial fog or war and thought that it added a little something to the game that is hard to describe, possibly ambience?
Overall, I thought that this game was ugly and lazy, but it was okay if you wanted to waste a few hours playing something. The best thing about this game by far is the multiplayer; everything else was just wasted effort, in my opinion, and could have waited until a later point and been used as part of a much better, more fleshed-out game.
5/10 – Okay!
Signed Off – Leonardo – PSJ
I wasn't all that impressed with this game, and I found it to be dull and repetitive. I thought that this game lacked substance and that it was very much bare bones. It was like the 3DO Company was playing it safe, and as this is their first game to reach home consoles, I can understand why. That doesn't mean that I can let the various issues I found go though. A common problem for the Army Men games is the controls and responses. Once again, the game responds to player inputs sluggishly, and at times you can be forgiven for pushing the directional button a little bit too hard in an attempt to get your character to turn faster. There is no allowance for this when fighting, and as such, it makes snap decisions and precise firefights an impossibility. It more often than not comes down to getting the jump on the enemy characters and blasting them as quickly as possible, hopefully before they do the same to you. That in itself presents another challenge for this game, and that is the abysmal auto-aim. It suffers from problems when there is more than one target, bouncing between them until either the player dies or one of the AI's does. Then comes another problem, and that is using the game's 'down sights' to aim for more precise shooting. It is just slow and sloppy to use, and it never quite seems to get the player's inputs correct. Needing constant inputs and jabs and then missing anyway, no matter how much you try. I felt that the plot was M.I.A. and didn't make much sense at all; it tied the levels together okay, but wasn't at all fleshed out or even that good. As a result, it just turned the game into a series of run-and-gun stages with little to no meaning. The ending was just out of left field and made no sense to me at all. Why was I fighting in a graveyard with ancient ruins? What was the point of that? It was either that the end was lazily slapped on or that it referenced things from other games in the series that you had to have played to understand. Either way, I didn't like that this game seemed to be missing some plot points or possibly even some story text.
I thought that the graphics were very plain and basic, even for the time. This game looked dated and old upon release and seemed to age like out-of-date milk. Everything was rendered with jagged lines, square sides, low-resolution skins, or smeared over stretched textures. Almost every object, vehicle, and interactible was just a variation of a square or rectangle and looked bad. The trees and other world objects were simple one-dimensional sprites that rotated with the camera to give the illusion of being 3D. Sarge was just a basic soldier model and looked nothing like he does in Sarge's Heroes or the later games, which I thought was weird. I didn't like the HUD either and felt that it was far too basic, with nowhere near enough information for the player. The health indicator being a soldier model that chips bits off when hit was just unnecessary to me; it felt like it was just needlessly flashy, and I would have preferred a simple numerical counter instead. The colours were dull and dreary, and they all seemed to be shades of the same three primary choices. Though I did like the partial fog or war and thought that it added a little something to the game that is hard to describe, possibly ambience?
Overall, I thought that this game was ugly and lazy, but it was okay if you wanted to waste a few hours playing something. The best thing about this game by far is the multiplayer; everything else was just wasted effort, in my opinion, and could have waited until a later point and been used as part of a much better, more fleshed-out game.
5/10 – Okay!
Signed Off – Leonardo – PSJ
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