To say the original Army Men game is a bit rough is an understatement. You hope games like that get a sequel that turns the series around, but a lot of the time, the sequel is just more of the same. Thankfully, Army Men II is an example of the former. The first game may have been somewhere between hot garbage and painfully okay, but Army Men II took that, fixed virtually everything that the first game did wrong, and produced a product that's not just much better but genuinely great. Just like how a lot of people ignore Wolfenstein and Duke Nukem until the 3D games, a lot of people don't bother with the original Army Men and just pick up at II, and I honestly can't blame them; after all, this was my first Army Men game. Army Men II picks up immediately after the end of the first game. Sarge has largely foiled the Tan plot to utilize their "super weapon" against the Green, but not completely; portals between the Plastic World and the Real World are now open, creating an entirely new front in the Green vs Tan war. The first level drops you out of a portal and on to a kitchen counter. You have to fight your way around to the other side of the U shaped counter to find the portal and return to the Plastic World. Once there, you fight your way through to a radio station to stop a Tan sabotage plot. That's largely how the campaign goes - a couple of mission in the Plastic World, a couple of missions in the Real World, a couple more in the Plastic World, etc. Between the switch between worlds and the varied environments within those worlds, that makes sure that the game never begins to feel stale. The campaign isn't super long anyway - it took me about four and a half hours - but what it lacks in quantity of hours, it makes up for in quality. About halfway through the game, you discover one of the Tan super weapons in this game; with the help of an insane Grey scientist, they have constructed a machine that takes the plastic pieces of dead soldiers and reanimates them into plastic zombies. These zombies are extremely tough to kill, and if you want a little more challenge (and a lot more chaos), there's a cheat you can enable that spawn a zombie every time a soldier dies. Personally, I love it, and because these guys are made entirely of plastic, it's not quite as left field as if you were playing through Battlefield and Russian corpses started reanimating and trying to eat you. In addition to the short but extremely fun campaign, there's also a multiplayer mode. I'm not sure if this still works online - I honestly never checked - but what I always do is set up a game against AI bots and have a huge Green vs Tan vs Grey vs Blue fight. You can select your map, select a certain number of units to start with - including vehicles - and have a bathtub meat grinder. This is one of the most important improvements over the first game, at least to me. The campaign is significantly better, but it's very short - shorter than the original game's. The multiplayer, however, is several orders of magnitude better, and it could keep me entertained for a whole day sun up to sun down. Aside from gameplay and controls, everything else about the game is superior, as well. Visually, it still looks like a game from a quarter century ago, but it looks much better than the previous game. Sound design doesn't even feel like the same series. Whereas the original game's sound design and music were downright painful after a level or two, the weapon sound effects are much improved here, and the soundtrack is not only tolerable but legitimately good and fits the tone of the game to a T. The voice acting, while still turn of the century gives-English-dubs-a-bad-name quality, is also much improved over the first game. Army Men II is one of the single most nostalgic games for me, and it reminds me of my early childhood. Back before cliques, back before we started liking girls and/or boys, back when my friend Richard and I were just military obsessed eight-year-olds before he went off to the Navy and I went off to become a teacher, there was Army Men, and it was our prepubescent boyhood daydreams come to life. Army Men II isn't the best PC game, it's not the best turn of the century game, and it's not even the best Army Men game, but it IS my favorite Army Men game because of the period of my life of which it evokes memories. Even aside from nostalgia, it's a seriously fun game, and like the first game, it's dirt cheap on GOG, so go download it asap. My Rating - B |
I'm a teacher.And I like to play video games. I like to collect video games. I like to talk about video games, and I like to write about video games. During the day, I teach high school history; during the night, I spend my spare time gaming. Then I write about it. Archives
April 2024
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