Army Men: World War - Final Front (or Lock 'n' Load as it's called in Europe) is the third game in the Army Men: World War subseries on Playstation. Like Land, Sea, Air before it, Final Front doesn't do a lot to change the formula here. It looks, sounds, and plays almost exactly like the two previous games. Visuals are still mediocre, controls are still a bit clunky, but it's an overall decent Army Men experience. Unfortunately, though, it does fall short of its predecessors in my opinion. One of the things that Final Front gets very right is the vehicle combat; there are more vehicles to fight in than in Land, Sea, Air with the addition of the motorcycle and the submarine. The submarine is definitely the cooler addition with battles underwater taking place in three dimensions, but the motorcycle was more fun to use purely because of how fast you can move and run over Tan soldiers. These vehicle missions have also lost the rails they tended to have in World War and Land, Sea, Air, giving the player more freedom to use the vehicles to traverse the level. Unfortunately, controlling your actual soldier - which is how the majority of the game is played - is still a slow and cumbersome experience. It's still a fun game in spite of that, as the previous games were, but I had hoped by their fourth PlayStation game and the third game in this subseries, we'd have progressed a bit with the player movement. As with the other Army Men games on the system, the visuals here are not impressive and do not push the PS1 to its limit. I wouldn't say they're bad, but I do think "sub-par" is a fair descriptor. Like Red Steel was on the Wii; it looked okay, but the Wii hardware was capable of significantly better visuals as we'd see later in its lifespan. However, this game came out a year into its console's successor's lifespan; there's little real excuse for the game to look this meh. Graphics aside, the sound design is a solidly mixed bag. On the one hand, the music is a definite step down from the two previous games. On the other hand, the sound effects are actually fairly impressive with the engine noise sounding appropriate and the crack of rifle fire having a good meaty feel to it. It's a shame, then, that the soldier controls, as I mentioned earlier, are still such garbage. I've heard the game supports Dual Shock controllers though I haven't confirmed that myself and that they make controlling your soldier a lot easier, but with the original PS1 controller, it takes what feels like forever to turn around which makes it hard to respond quickly to enemy fire. Like most of the Army Men series, World War - Final Front is a middling piece of the PlayStation's library. The visuals sub-par, the controls are outright bad, but the sound and actual gameplay are pretty solid. As I've said with most of the Army Men series, if you're a big fan of the franchise or a passionate collector of PlayStation exclusive games, this one is worth picking up if you can find it fairly inexpensively. It's not going to wow you, and it's definitely not a hidden gem by any stretch of the imagination, but it is a fairly enjoyable war game. My Rating - C |
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
May 2024
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