Also available on PlayStation and Nintendo 64 Army Men: Sarge's Heroes 2 might well be the best game in the series. I'm partial to Army Men II, but unless one of the few later releases that I haven't played in years is better than I remember, Sarge's Heroes 2 is probably the best game from an objective standpoint. Now, if you go on Metacritic or Gamespot or similar sites, you'll see the exact opposite; a lot of those sites say that Sarge's Heroes 2 is worse than the original game. I firmly disagree with that, and I think that critics are generally wrong about Army Men, at least from an experience standpoint. The games may be rough visually and have unfair difficulty curves more often than not, but they're dumb fun, and that's an oft underestimated part of the video game experience. Sarge's Heroes 2 is a direct sequel to the first Sarge's Heroes. After the events of the first game, General Plastro is trapped in the real world where he was eventually plastered, or frozen in place as an actual toy soldier due to staying in the real world for too long. After a series of military defeats in Plastro's absences, Colonel Grimm convinces the acting Tan commander, Field Marshal Tannenburg, agrees to an armistice. Unbeknownst to either Grimm or Tannenburg, Bridget Blue, a spy from the Blue nation, has an anti-plastrification serum developed by Grey scientist Dr. Madd (despite being from a different universe, this is the same - or at least a parallel version of - the "mad Grey scientist" from Army Men II) and revives Plastro. After rebuilding his forces at a toy store, Plastro bursts through a portal and assaults the peace treaty signing event, thus ensuring that the war between Green and Tan would continue. Most people - at least fellow Army Men fans I've discussed the game with - seem to like the lighter story here more than the previous game's story with its overt mention of death rays and torture. I, on the other hand, usually prefer darker stories, so while I prefer this game over the first one, I found the previous game's story to be a little more interesting. That's just personal preference, though, not a point for or against either game. In the first Sarge's Heroes, the four versions were split into two "build" of the game but were relatively identical to one another outside of graphical quality. That's largely the same here, but not exactly. The Nintendo 64 version of the game came out first, a few months prior to the PlayStation version's release, but while they have identical stories, the PlayStation version was actually built from the ground up separately from the N64 version. When the PlayStation 2 version came out a year later, rather than being based on the PS1 version, 3DO took the N64 version and adapted and improved it for the PS2 release. That's probably a good thing, too, as the PS1 version is by far the worst looking of the three and actually looks worse in my opinion than Sarge's Heroes did on the system. There are some exclusive features to each version, as well. The N64 version gets an exclusive level not present in the PS1 or PS2 versions. The PS2 version gets drastically improved visuals and, in some cases, completely redone models. The PS1 version gets...disappointment. That's all it gets. Jokes aside, though, there are four weapons and six enemies that only appear in the PS1 version as well as one enemy that appears in the N64 and PS2 versions but not in the PS1 version. Most noteworthy here, to me at least, is that 3DO didn't make the same mistake with the 6th gen release of Sarge's Heroes 2 that did with Sarge's Heroes. Sarge's Heroes on Dreamcast, like the PS2 version of Sarge's Heroes 2, was based on the Nintendo 64 version. With the first game, however, that included the lack of FMV cut scenes despite the Dreamcast's GD-ROM format having more than enough space for the FMV scenes. With Sarge's Heroes 2, however, the PlayStation 2 is a truly definitive version (minus the one N64 exclusive level and a few PS1 exclusive weapons and enemies, but those are minor details); not only have the PS1 cut scenes been included in the PS2 port, but they've been remastered to look much better and run much smoother in addition to running at a higher resolution. It really makes me wish even more that Sarge's Heroes on Dreamcast had been given the same treatment. In terms of performance, the versions rank just like you'd expect; PS1 had the most instances of slowdown in my experience, with N64 suffering from some slowdown as well but not quite to the same degree, and the PS2 version winning hands down with very little slowdown and drastically improved visuals. I do have one grip with the PS2 visuals, and this is completely subjective - the zombies outside of Dr. Madd's castle don't look as cool. They definitely look more like zombies, but that honestly takes part of it's charm; in the 5th gen versions of the game, they look like they do in Army Men II and Toys in Space - shambling army men with limbs of all different colors. You can see some color variation on PS2, but they look too much like actual toy zombies and not enough like Army Men zombies for my taste. As I said, though, that's definitely a personal taste issue, not a knock against the game. As far as music goes, the Sarge's Heroes sub-series is 2-2; the music is fantastic and even better than it was in the previous game. I may not have like the story in Sarge's Heroes 2 quite as much as I like that in the previous game, but the missions in Sarge's Heroes 2 win hands down. You spend a lot of time in the real world in this game whereas it was pretty scarce in the previous one, and that is definitely to the game's benefit. The most memorable and iconic mission in the whole game in my opinion is the refrigerator level. You have to climb your way up inside this fridge, fighting Tan soldiers along the way, while you search for and destroy cans of deplastrification spray. It's a pretty short level, but that's true of most levels in the game; only one level took me more than ten minutes to complete (excluding deaths and restarts), and that only took 12 minutes with most missions averaging around 5 or 6 minutes once I knew what I was doing. That's not a bad thing, though; one of my biggest complaints with the previous game was that the increasingly long levels added difficulty through an obnoxious method with the lack of checkpoints mid-level. There are still no checkpoints in the level here, but with levels that take less time to complete fully here than it takes to reach a checkpoint one-third of the way through some of Sarge's Heroes's later levels, that's not too bad; even if you get killed at the very end of the level, you've only lost five or six minutes, not ten or twenty. For me, there are few games quite as nostalgic as Army Men: Sarge's Heroes 2. I used to play this for hours on my Nintendo 64 with friends when I was in elementary school. I even had action figures of Sergeant Hawk and General Plastro when I was a kid. It may not look or play quite as brilliantly as it does in my childhood memories, but that doesn't mean it's not a genuinely good game. The auto aim is a little more irritating and less reliable than in the previous game, and at least on PlayStation, it doesn't look quite as good as the previous game, but the visuals saw a bit of an improvement on Nintendo 64, and the PlayStation 2 version truly looks like it's a generation ahead whereas the Dreamcast version of the previous game looked markedly better but only barely a "generational" leap if at all. Whether its the local deathmatch multiplayer or the cheesy but fun as hell single player, Sarge's Heroes 2 is definitely a game you need to play. If you collect for Nintendo 64, this one is absolutely mandatory, especially if you can get the green cartridge. If you collect for PlayStation, you should snag this one just because there are so many Army Men games on the console, and they look great on a shelf next to one another. If you collect for PlayStation 2, there are still five Army Men games on PS2 - six if you count Portal Runner - but I wouldn't say it's as much of a collection must-have as it is for PS1 or N64, although the PS2 version is definitely the definitive way to play the game. Whatever retro console you prefer, give this game a play. 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
May 2024
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