Army Men: Air Tactics was my first introduction to airborne Army Men growing up. As a kid, my mom got me this four-pack CD-ROM set from Sam's with Army Men, Army Men II, Army Men: Toys in Space, and Army Men: Air Tactics. I always spent most of my time playing Army Men II and Army Men: Toys in Space, but I do remember Air Tactics fondly. Unfortunately, it was a lot easier to play 20 years ago. I genuinely spent three or four hours finding it online (thank you, www.myabandonware.com), fiddling with the compatibility settings, giving up entirely on getting it to work on Windows 11, teaching myself how to set up a virtual machine, finding an ISO and CD key for Windows 95, installing that, and THEN installing Air Tactics on the virtual machine. A game designed for Windows 95 just does not like Windows 11. Was it worth all that effort? Ehh....maybe? The Army Men "Air" games have an exceptionally convoluted history as far as naming goes, so to avoid the confusion I had in one of the Army Men Discord servers, I'll try to explain it all here. The first Air game released which also introduce Captain William Blade as a Green protagonist was Army Men: Air Combat on PlayStation in late 1999. Then in March, 2000, Army Men: Air Tactics releases on Windows. In July, 2000, Air Attack is released on Nintendo 64 but under the title of Army Men: Air Combat; a Game Boy Color game with the same title would be released in November of 2000. Also in November of 2000, Army Men: Air Attack 2 would release on PlayStation. Then in March, 2001, Air Attack 2 released on PlayStation 2 but would inexplicably have the title changed to Army Men: Air Attack - Blade's Revenge in Europe, but only for the PlayStation 2 version; the PlayStation 1 version is still called Army Men: Air Attack 2 in Europe. Later that year in June, 2001, Army Men: Air Attack would release on Windows (it did not carry the Air Combat title; for some reason, that was just for Nintendo). Lastly, in March of 2003, Air Attack 2 released on Gamecube with the title Army Men: Air Combat - The Elite Missions. So, as you can see, it's a confusing release history. The tl;dr is that Air Attack/Air Combat came first, and they're the same game; then came Air Tactics; then came Air Attack 2/Blade's Revenge/The Elite Missions which are all the same game. Why they couldn't just pick one title and stick with it across regions and console manufacturers, I don't know, but it is what it is. Air Tactics isn't a 3D game like Air Attack; instead, it uses a modified version of the Army Men II engine to produce a 2D overhead view game. While you normally think of helicopter combat as taking place in a three-dimensional space - and it does, in a way - the 2D perspective works well here. I guess it's more accurate to call it a sort of pseudo-2.5D because you do move along the Z axis, but only in certain places that have ramp-like environmental features, and only up to a certain height; basically, you maintain a static hover above the ground, so the only way to "ascend" is to go somewhere with a gradually increasing elevation. Like in Air Combat, you follow Captain William Blade of Alpha Wolf Squadron. Most of his missions are a support role for Sergeant Hawk, but you do get to take on some pretty fierce Tan opposition as you're ferrying Hawk and his men around or softening up a beachhead for an assault. The story revolves around the Green Army's attempt to establish and maintain air supremacy and stop the Tan from developing some kind of chemical weapon of mass destruction. Visually, the game is pretty much identical to Army Men II. Some elements here and there look a touch improved, but overall, it's basically Army Men II with a helicopter. The visuals are honestly the highlight of the game; this era of advanced 2D in lieu of primitive 3D graphics is sorely underappreciated in my opinion. The sound design is...well, I honestly have no idea. Despite the fact that the sound worked normally on the desktop of my Windows 95 virtual machine, nothing I did made the sound work in game. From what I can remember from playing it over 20 years ago, it sounded great, but that could be the rose tinted headphones talking. What I can definitely speak to is the control, and it's not great. The helicopter feels SUPER floaty and imprecise with its controls. Granted, I'm using a modern mouse instead of an old school trackball this game would have been designed to use, so the oversensitivity of my mouse could be affected me here as it did in Army Men II and Army Men: Toys in Space, although considering that most reviews I've read also lament the controls - "driving a car on a field of Crisco," I believe, is how IGN's reviewer worded - I'm inclined to believe that the controls really are just bad. What I know for a fact isn't a problem caused by my modern mouse, though, is the hit detection. It was seemingly random whether my shots would hit a Tan soldier or harmlessly hit the area beside his feet. There would be bullets you can clearly see hitting him - bullet pixel on body pixel contact - but no damage, and then sometimes a bullet would clearly miss him, but you'd still see flakes of Tan plastic break off as he takes damage. No rhyme or reason whatsoever. Despite the horrific controls, the garbage hit detection, and the inexplicably absent sound during my playthrough, I have to admit that I did enjoy revisiting Air Tactics. It's definitely not what I'd call a high point for the series, but it's also not Major Malfunction, so it's at least not the worst game in the series. If you want to give this one a play these days, good luck; you'll either need a computer running Windows XP or earlier - maybe Vista at the absolute newest - or a virtual machine running ideally Windows 95 or Windows 98. I know that for most tech savvy people, virtual machines or dual boot PCs are no big deal, but it was a pain in the ass to teach myself how to set one up for literally the sole purpose of playing this one game. Do I regret that massive time investment? Not even a little; no Army Men game left behind. Would I recommend anyone else who doesn't already know how to set up a virtual machine go through the hassle just to play this game? Absolutely not. My Rating - DThe PS1 Army Men: World War subseries always needs to have some sort of gimmick. With the first game, it was "You're not Sarge anymore! Now you're a random Green soldier!" With Land Sea Air, it was "You're a random Green soldier BUT WITH MORE VEHICLE MISSIONS!" With Final Front, it was "You're a random Green soldier with vehicle combat INCLUDING SUBMARINES!" Here with Team Assault, it's "You're a specific commando who isn't Sarge, and there's vehicle and submarine combat, but now there's TWO OF YOU!" Team Assault follows a team of Green soldiers on a mission that starts with their escape from a Tan POW camp and culminates in the infiltration and destruction of a Tan ballistic missile base. For each mission, you must pick two soldiers from your pool of six. Each of these soldiers have two skills and unique stats. Squirrel, for example, is my favorite and has the Sniper and Communications skills, so he can use radio equipment (required for some missions) and sniper rifles. He's also not very stealthy but has by far the fastest movement speed. I liked pairing him with is Tyke who is super slow, not stealthy at all, but has a ton of hit points and the Heavy Weapons and Linguistics skills meaning that he can use bazookas and mortars as well as Tan disguises. The mixing and matching of soldiers gives your strategy some real depth and variation. It does feel a bit clunky and obnoxious to have to switch between your two soldiers and move them independently, but you get used to it, and once you do, it's not so bad. Visuals and sound are overall on par with the previous World War games on PlayStation, but the gameplay and controls feel tighter here than in the previous entries. The auto-aim feature felt a lot more polished and a lot smoother, and that definitely helps mitigate some of the more frustrating aspects of combat in the previous games. It's not perfect - you'll still routinely shoot to the left of an enemy, then to the right, then back to the left, and THEN actually shoot him - but it's a huge step up. I thought World War was a pretty good length as it is, and I thought Land Sea Air was too long given how brutally difficult it is, but with Team Assault, I actually found myself wishing there were more there. The game consists of 16 missions, and even with dying and restarting, it took me under three hours to clear. Army Men: World War - Team Assault is, in my opinion, the best of the four World War subseries games on Playstation. Honestly, the only thing keeping me from scoring it higher is the lack of friendly AI for the soldier you're not controlling; they'll fire at the enemy if they come close enough, but otherwise, they just stand there. It would have been nice for them to follow you and shoot at enemies you come across instead of standing still wherever you left them. On the one hand, that does let you strategize a bit by leaving a sniper on a high elevation position to provide overwatch, but that's mitigated by the fact that you then have to switch back and walk them all the way to wherever you got with the other soldier as well as the fact that what AI the ally soldier does have isn't good enough to provide any truly effective cover fire. Still, though, I had a blast with this game, and I definitely recommend it any Army Men fan or PlayStation enthusiast check it out. It's not an amazing game or a hidden gem or anything, but it's fun plastic-on-plastic violence. My Rating - CArmy 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 - CArmy 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 - CTechnically, Army Men III doesn't actually exist as a commercial game. It's an abandoned fan-made game done in Unreal Engine 4 that takes place after the events of Army Men II but seems to exclude the events of Army Men: Toys in Space. Unfortunately, having been abandoned, the game will probably never be finished and stay in a rough beta state forever. That's a shame, too, because this beta is the foundations of a REALLY good game. Certainly better than the garbage that Global Star Software or Take Two Interactive released. Picking up after Major Mylar's defeat at the end of Army Men II, this is the fan-made conclusion to what was originally intended to be a trilogy following Sarge's exploits and culminating with a showdown with the mad Grey doctor who created the zombie experiments. Unfortunately, 3DO never finished that story opting to pivot to Army Men: Toys in Space and Army Men: Air Tactics before shifting their focus to the Nintendo 64 and especially the PlayStation. Unlike the overhead tactics-esque gameplay of Army Men and Army Men II, Army Men III takes a third person shooter perspective somewhat akin to Sarge's Heroes but with a faster paced feel. Think Gears of War rather than Uncharted. While the game does follow Sarge's battles, you don't actually play as Sarge. Instead, you play as a Green corporal named Wallace Niles who assists Sarge on his missions, sometimes on the same battlefield and sometimes in a support role by handling a task that frees Sarge up to handle the war's main objectives. The game was in an alpha or beta state when it was abandoned, so unfortunately, only a quarter of the intended campaign is playable - four, I think, of the intended 16 levels - and what's there, while completely playable and a lot of fun, is pretty buggy. The physics feel weird with bizarre ragdoll effects that would be at home in a Bethesda RPG, and sometimes it takes the game fifteen or twenty seconds to realize you've died before giving you the option to quit or reload. It took me about an hour and a half to get through what of the game was made, so it's not a terribly long demo, but as is the case with the best games in my opinion, what it lacks in quantity of gameplay, it makes up for in quality. This is one of the most addicting non-commercial fan-games I've ever played. I've seen some on ModDB claim this is the "best Army Men game ever," and I'm not prepared to go quite that far - Army Men II and Sarge's Heroes 2 still exist - it is a DAMN good game. Sound design is a bit wonky, but it's a fan-made game that never got finished and features full voice acting; wonk is part of the deal. Visually, the game looks pretty good for the most part, but there are some visual and performance issues that crop up here and there. Some of the textures look great while others look a bit muddy and blurred. I imagine a lot of that would have been worked out before a final release if the game had gotten one, but as it is, the game is a bit of a mixed bag visually. As for performance, a lot of the game runs extremely smoothly, but there are times where it gets super choppy and chugs for a second or two. I'm running a RTX 4090 and a 13th gen i9, so I know it isn't a hardware issue. Despite that, though, there's a ton of fun to be had here, and the missions give you some solid variety of objectives and a huge array of vehicles and weapons to use to shoot, blow up, or melt your Tan foes. In addition to the campaign, there's also a skirmish mode that lets you battle in some pretty cool and varied environments that you don't get to see in the short available campaign missions. Army Men III is an interesting experience. As a fan-made game, it's an exceptional foundation, but as the project was abandoned years ago, it will never live up to its full - and undoubtedly awesome - potential. It's got, in my opinion, the most fast paced combat of any Army Men game, and it's a shame that we didn't get to see that fleshed out. If Take-Two would actually DO something with the IP, they could look to Army Men III for inspiration and make an awesome budget game to reboot the series, but as that's unlikely, this unfinished and rough around the edges demo is sadly going to have to suffice for a "modern" Army Men experience. Still, though it's unfinished, it's also free, so there's no reason not to give it a download and try it out. My Rating - CBack in the days before smartphones were a thing, mobile gaming was done with Java based games. Army Men's foray into the Java mobile game space was Mobile Ops, a solidly okay at best game. For a 2010 Java mobile game, it's not horrendous, but it's awkward, clunky, and just...not a great experience. I make a sincere effort to play every game I review on original hardware, but that's sadly just not possible for this one, so I had to use a Windows emulator. The game's narrative premise is...simple. You're a Green Army recruit who's thrust into his first mission right out of boot camp. That's about it. You do things like save Green POWs, escape a Tan base, etc. Basic Army Men objectives that could fit into literally any game in the series. As it's an old school mobile phone game, the controls are a bit awkward. I mapped the controls to an Xbox One controller to be as comfortable and intuitive as possible, and I still found it pretty awkward. The gameplay itself isn't bad, though. You assemble a squad of three soldiers from the Rifle, Bazooka, Grenade, and Minesweeper classes. Because all damage all day is the way I play literally every game, I went with Rifle, Bazooka, and Grenade for every mission. You can change between them at will, but when one soldier dies, he becomes unavailable and you have to make due with the others. There's also a limited amount of ammo, but due to the weird dimensions of the emulator and the inability to just stretch the screen to fit, I was never able to see my ammo count or even my health. I ended up just shooting until suddenly I couldn't shoot anymore, and I would run around getting shot until I abruptly died. Not ideal, but for a mediocre game on old mobile phones being run through an emulator a decade and a half later, it's passable. Considering the type of hardware it was made for, the game actually looks pretty good. I thought it looked good blown up on my PC monitor, and with how tiny the screen on an old Nokia phone is, it probably would have looked pretty great on original hardware. Unfortunately, that's about where my praise stops. Gameplay, as I said, is decent but not great. Controls are just awkward and cumbersome, although that's somewhat to be expected on an old cell phone game. The sound is...just terrible. In that regard, it fits right in with the Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance games from a decade earlier. Sadly, there's just not a whole lot of positive here aside from "It exists and is, in fact, a game." With how difficult it is to get this running on real hardware and how cumbersome and obnoxious Java emulators are for PC and modern smartphones, I honestly do not recommend anyone go out and find a way to play this game. I don't even recommend this to devoted Army Men fans unless you're the most hardcore of the hardcore fans. If it were easily accessible, then I'd definitely recommend checking it out, but with the annoying barriers to entry in the modern day, it's just not worth the hassle. My Rating - D |
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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