A Review: Army Men: Sarge's Heroes, N64 1999

Army Men: Sarge's Heroes is a third-person shooter developed and published by the 3DO Company and is the fourth entry in the Army Men series of games. They are based on the green plastic figures of the same name, made popular by the Toy Story films. The port for the Dreamcast was developed by Saffire and published by Midway Home Entertainment, while the Windows version was published by GT Interactive. Play is done in the third-person perspective, where the player guides the Green Army's Sarge on a series of missions to stop the evil Tan Army's General Plastro from bringing new superweapons through portals from the human world back to the toy world.

I wasn't itching to play this game when I started it, and although I thought it was okay, I was far from impressed by it. There were a series of issues that bugged me, and more than once I had to switch the game off and walk away. One of the most annoying things that I found was the poorly implemented controls and their responses. Sarge cannot aim without turning his entire body in this game, and it really effects play negatively, in my opinion. It makes snap responses to being shot or attacked near impossible, and more than once I was killed by an enemy soldier because it took forever to turn and aim. Using explosive-type weapons was also a point where you'd take your life into your own hands, as sometimes the game didn't know what you were trying to destroy and would instead simply detonate the weapon in the player's face. I didn't like the HUD at all and found that it wasn't as accurate as I would have liked it to have been; it made decisions about health and item pickups much harder than was needed, in my opinion. I will say that it was very easy to follow the game's plot, and the simple style of a-b-c play made going through the game a reasonably pleasant experience in that regard. You didn't have to think too much, and that was welcome sometimes, as it provided a break from more intense games. I didn't like the camera either, though, and thought that it was absolute ass. It would react weirdly to trying to peek around corners and only seemed able to focus in one direction. Sometimes it would break into buildings or objects and then glitch out or get hung up, which was annoying. Even with all these issues, I still feel that this was an okay game if you weren't looking for something serious and you could look past the flaws.

The graphics were okay for the most part, and I liked the simple environments and objects. Sarge's body looked fairly good, and his model looked pretty close to what I would expect from an actual toy solider. The tanks and vehicles looked pretty good and again seemed to match up with their real-world counterparts pretty well. I liked the weapons fire and explosions (when not in my face); they were pretty good for an N64 game of the time. The minimap was not the best, but I feel it got the job done well enough to get a passing mark, though I did think that it was a little too bare at times. I thought that the backgrounds were a little lazy and seemed to be either low resolution, smeared colours, or overstretched still images. I would have also liked there to be more variation between the colours used for the environments and structures or objects, but I guess they were okay if you didn't focus on them too much.
 

Yeah, overall, this is one of those games that isn't terrible but isn't all that good either, and once completed, it's pretty easy to forget.

5/10 – Okay!
Signed Off – Leonardo – PSJ