Also available on Gamecube, PlayStation 2, and Windows 2003 was a dark year. That was the year that 3DO filed for bankruptcy and sold off the Army Men IP to Global Star Software. Global Star then proceeded to say "What if we took Army Men, removed everything that made it a cult classic series, and added in a bunch of gritty dark drama that literally not one singular person on Earth asked for?" Thus Sarge's War was born. The box art says it all. Sargeant Hawk stands atop a pile of melting Tan corpses amidst a destroyed brick wall that, probably because it's made of plastic I guess, is burning with a bandolier around his chest, an M-16 in one hand, and a heavy machine gun in the other. Yeah...it's as weird as it sounds. The premise of the game is that, after repelling a vicious Tan surprise attack, the Green Army manages to fight the Tan to the point where General Plastro agrees to a peace treaty. Right out of the gate, Global Star has the series's primary antagonist acting super out of character. Also why is Plastro out the Green military prison and back in command of the Tan Army? Like, did these guys even play the games they're making a sequel to? Anyway, a rogue faction of the Tan Army led by a "Lord Malice" - super creative and not at all edgelord name - manages to Trojan Horse what looks like a nuclear bomb into the courtyard where the treaty signing is taking place by hiding it inside a statue commemorating the historic peace accord. When the bomb detonates, Greentown is destroyed. Plastro is dead. Grimm is dead. All of the Bravo Company heroes are dead. Countless Green and Tan soldiers and civilians are dead. Sarge, who was racing to warn Grimm when he learned about the bomb after fighting a group of rogue Tan, gets to Greentown just in time to see the mushroom cloud. As he walks through the carnage, he sees Vikki's half melted form. She dies in his arms. Sarge then does the obligatory angst scream, finds two automatic weapons to point in the air, and starts firing at the clouds. It's cliche, it's horribly out of character and off tone for the series, and it's just...weird. It's like a shitty version of Spec Ops: The Line eight years before Spec Ops: The Line came out. Lest you think my only complaint with the game is the bizarre story, think again. The sound design is horrendous as well. It took the sound problems of Army Men RTS and made them ten times worse. You can adjust the sound effect volume, music volume, and in-game voice volume from the settings menu...but you can't adjust the cut scene volume at all. So at default levels, sound effects are deafening, music is obnoxiously loud, people are shouting in-game, and everyone is whispering in the cut scenes as if you're in church and mom has thwacked you in the head with the bulletin twice already. I'd go on to criticize the music, but there's hardly any. There's some music here and there, but by and large, the levels are played in silence except for the gunshots. Not even footsteps - unless you're on a metal floor or something or climbing up a ladder, you run silently. That won't stop the Tan from hearing your non-existent footstep sounds, but you definitely won't hear them. It's just...a weird sound effect omission. I don't even know if that was intentional or a bug that made it past QA along with the entire garbage story. Oh, and the worst offense of all is the voice acting. Instead of having Jim Cummings voice everyone as is tradition for the Sarge's Heroes universe games, they got some Terry Maratos guy to voice Sargeant Hawk. His filmography suggests he's a decent actor, but he sucked as Sergeant Hawk. Zero wit or humor. Just dark and angsty edgelord. While that's exactly what Global Star was going for, it's absolutely not Sarge. While I could fill a tome with complaints about the artistic direction of this game, as an actual game, I have to admit that it's really not as a bad to play as it is to experience from a narrative perspective. It looks good for the series; it's no Halo 2 or Metroid Prime, but the visuals are better than anything we'd seen from the series previously. As expected, the PS2 version looks just a tad rougher than its two counterparts, but it looks pretty much the same on Gamecube and Xbox. Controls, oddly enough, are the biggest differences. I can't put my finger on exactly why, but the controls just feel wrong on PlayStation 2. The aiming feels stiff and jerky, and the buttons, while the same basic layout as the other two versions, just feel awkward to use. Gamecube, on the other hand, feels flawless. Totally comfortable, totally natural, and completely complaint-free from me. Xbox, the version I played through from start to finish for my review since I wanted to get as many platforms represented in the series as I could, falls in the middle but FAR closer to the Gamecube side of things. It doesn't feel quite as comfortable to control as it does on Gamecube, but it still feels excellent outside of some minor aiming jank, and it's infinitely more playable than the PlayStation 2 version. Army Men: Sarge's War is a game that honestly isn't bad but is just...weird. It shows how utterly tone deaf Global Star was with the series, and honestly, I think this game is the beginning of the end of Army Men considering that Global Star only made one game after this, and, aside from a weird Java mobile phone game in 2010, no Army Men game was made after Take-Two bought the IP in 2007. Army Men may not have been enough to save 3DO, and it may not have been a mainstream series, but the folks who liked it - like me - REALLY liked it, and if Global Star had taken the time to learn and appreciate what the series was, I genuinely think it could have made them a decent even if not massive profit. Sarge's War is definitely worth a play if you have a Gamecube or PC able to run 20 year old games, a PlayStation 2 if you're in a PAL territory, or an Xbox if you're in North America. Just know going into it that while it has the same protagonist as Sarge's Heroes and Sarge's Heroes 2, the tone of the game is diametrically opposed. 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
June 2024
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