Army Men, as a series, is almost always a bit rough around the edges. That was certainly true of the first game in the series, and it was true of the first game on the PlayStation, and it's still true for the second game in the Army Men: World War subseries - Land, Sea, Air. If you played Army Men: World War, then you basically know what to expect as this game is largely more of the same. The main difference is the difficulty; this game is genuinely probably the most brutally difficult game in the entire series. Visually, Land Sea Air is indistinguishable from World War, and that's not entirely a bad thing. It doesn't look great, even by Playstation standards, but I think there's a certain charm in the budget vibe Army Men games have. For the most part, this is more an expansion or continuation of Army Men: World War than anything else. You fight through five operations with three missions each, and as the title suggests, the biggest difference between World War and Land Sea Air is a larger focus on vehicle missions here. One mission, you're manning the guns on a bomber fighting off enemy fighters on the way to drop bombs on a Tan target; in another mission, you man the guns on a tank that rolls through a bombed out city on rails and have to eliminate anti-tank crews before they destroy your vehicle. Those missions are similar to the train mission in the first Army Men: World War game on Playstation, but instead of a fun little diversion from the norm, these missions are really where things start to go downhill. The beginning of the game feels tough but fair - nothing you haven't seen in other Army Men games. Once you reach that God forsaken bomber mission, though, it goes full Dark Souls. The bomber mission nearly had me involuntarily committed. It sounds easy enough - shoot down enemy fighters as they approach, aiming wherever your pilot tells you to (11 o'clock, 4 o'clock, etc) - but the game makes it unreasonably difficult. It requires absolute perfection to a degree only obtainable by repeating the level DOZENS of times and just memorizing where planes appear when. Even if you shoot down every plane before they get to you - something I was able to do after a couple of tries - you'll still die before the end of this unnecessarily long mission simply by the accumulation of small bits of damage; the only way to avoid that is to be shooting at the planes before they even spawn, hence the need for memorization. It's not just the vehicle levels that are brutal, either; the whole game is unusually tough. The general rule of thumb in war games is that the faster the rate of fire, the lower the accuracy. 3DO apparently forgot about that here; Tan soldiers can pretty much snipe you from the maximum draw distance with a machine gun. If you've ever played Battlefield 2042 against bots, think about the AI sniping you with a PKP in that game; it's the same concept except you're plastic and playing in 240p. That's a shame, too, because the controls are pretty good, at least compared to Army Men 3D. The level variety, too, with the array of different vehicle-based missions really mixes up the experience in a way that Army Men 3D didn't and Army Men: World War didn't do often enough. The game would be a ton of fun to play if it weren't so frustratingly difficult. Maybe in late 90s and early 2000s when I was a kid, I would have been more tolerant of this degree of difficulty since not nearly as many games were releasing and we were still in the days where most games were padded with high difficulty to lengthen the game artifically, but in 2024 at age 32 with a full time job, I just do not have the patience for that. I mean, I clearly pushed through for the sake of my review, but I only managed it because my superpowers are pig headed stubbornness and autism. Army Men: World War - Land, Sea, Air is, at its core, a pretty decent game. It's not an amazing game - this is Army Men we're talking about - but it's really not bad at its core, and I feel compelled to have my score reflect that. Unfortunately, that core is buried beneath an AI endowed with god-like aim and omniscience and a degree of difficulty that I'm pretty sure violates some part of the Geneva Conventions. If someone could make a ROM hack that just tweaks the difficulty - maybe double the amount of health you have or halve enemy bullet damage - this would be a dope game. As it is, though, it's tragically more frustrating than it is fun, and that's a real bummer since the gameplay isn't what holds it down like the first Army Men and some of the Gold Star Software era games. If you're a big Army Men fan or a Playstation enthusiast, this is a neat system exclusive to try out, but for anyone else, steer clear if you value your sanity and time. 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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