Army men: rts

Overview

Plastic soldiers. Many of us know và love these cherished icons of childhood, but beyond moông chồng combat & the occasional magnifying glass laser experiment, they weren"t useful for all that much. Until now. 3DO, purveyors of small time plastic warfare, has finally released a RTS for the console market. Originally starting with PC games & later moving lớn more specialized console titles lượt thích Green Rogue, the fine developers at 3DO have produced a quiông xã, fun, & easy RTS that anyone can play on their PS2.

Centered on our heroes, the Green Army, & Sarge, the toughest soldier in said Green Army, Army Men is a stirring story of betrayal, mix in the backdrop of the most important war ever. Not really, but melodrama suits this sort of title. In a very Coppola-esque beginning, we learn that Colonel Blintz, a valorous green soldier, has turned traitor. In Sarge"s words, "He"s gone Tan." Colonel Blintz, after being wounded in a battle that left hlặng missing several square inches of his skull, retreated inlớn the safety of the house, khổng lồ build a small Tan empire, all while styling himself a strange Apocalypse Now style villain.

Naturally, it"s up lớn Sarge and his Boys, along with most of the Green Army, to engage Blintz, & khuyến mãi with him with any means necessary. This means war! After establishing your beachhead on the outside of the Fence, you"ll need lớn fight your way behind enemy lines và wage war against an enemy beyond compare. In other words, it"s time to lớn melt some plastic.

Gameplay, Controls, Interface

The screen controls are accomplished with the analog sticks, & thankfully, each control is easy to learn and use. Holding down the shoulder buttons will let you open and select new construction items, confirming things with the X button. You can select multiple units at once, và they"ll stay grouped as one giant unit, which can be selected later at the press of a button. Adding and removing units is similarly easy. Play around with the basic controls in the game tutorial, & you"ll see that 3DO took the complexity of a RTS và put it inkhổng lồ an easily controllable package.

Like all RTS games, this centers on base building, resource collection, and unit-to-unit warfare. After learning how khổng lồ create simple things like a Barracks or a Garage, you"ll get access khổng lồ bigger and badder buildings and units later on in the game. Barracks, like you may have guessed, let you mint new troopers, with the Garage manufacturing your vehicles. Tanks, Half-Tracks, Helicopters, Flamethrowers, Grenadiers, and even Machine gunners will all be yours later on in the game. All part and parcel for a RTS, but I was very happy to lớn see that they put it all into a PS2 title, something I previously thought improbable.

Xem thêm: Autodesk Drive - A360 Drive Is No Longer Available For Free

The action is pretty quiông xã, a big bonus in my opinion. Proper balance between intense warfare và quiông chồng combat is critical, as demonstrated by the poorly executed Command và Conquer: Tiberian Sun, và the excellent Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2. In the case of Westwood, they found that "balancing high" and giving every trooper a lot of kill potential helped the game, và I think they"ve sầu discovered the same thing at 3DO. If you"ve got a good mass of troopers, you"ll generally be able to wipe out the enemy pretty quickly, as even with as tough as the toy soldiers are, they"re just plastic.

Beat each mission in the single player mode, và you"ll start lớn earn new intelligence files, which you can access from the main menu. Displaying information và units from the game, these files are a neat little extra. Even better, each mission has a series of objectives, which allow you khổng lồ unlochồng more intelligence files, and even other missions lớn play in your meantime between campaign missions. Some are unusual, others very difficult, but each of these extra missions is meant to lớn be a nice little bonus.

Graphics

The appearance of all of the characters has really been cleaned up as compared khổng lồ the previous Army Men titles, & the graphic power of the PS2 goes far in making the everyday household environments appear convincingly realistic. Details were abundant, like the pencils that go into creating a fenced barricade. Still, Army Men looked lượt thích it hadn"t progressed that far, with relatively small viewing distances, occasionally clippy units, và cutscene animations that showed off how un-dynamic some of their animations were. In particular, the only time you see a transport helicopter is usually when it passes by, after which the camera switches khổng lồ a ground angle where you see Sarge lvà in-scene.

Audio

I loved the audio in this title about as much as I like the score to lớn any war film, which is lớn say, a lot. Little sweeping pieces of composition matched perfectly with the battle cries and screams of small plastic warfare. If 3DO offered an editor, you"d definitely see me constructing my own little snapshots of Apocalypse Now, complete with that same bizarre voiceover by Martin Sheen.

Bottom Line

All in all, if this was an experiment by 3DO, I"d say it was a relatively successful one. In my opinion, it doesn"t suông chồng. It"s got a few issues, especially given that the game is 3D, and you can"t rotate your camera angle. The graphics, as good as they are, occasionally look low-res, but those are really trivial matters when you consider the rest of the game as a whole. With the few extras, và entertaining single player chiến dịch, I was very happy with Army Men: RTS. It might not stiông chồng out as absolutely superb, but it"s definitely sharing space on my shelf.