Back 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
May 2024
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