Originally starting with PC games and later moving to more specialized console titles like Green Rogue, the fine developers at 3DO have produced a quick, fun, and easy RTS that anyone can play on their PS2. Centered on our heroes, the Green Army, and Sarge, the toughest soldier in said Green Army, Army Men is a stirring story of betrayal, set 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. Naturally, it's up to Sarge and his Boys, along with most of the Green Army, to engage Blintz, and deal with him with any means necessary. This means war! After establishing your beachhead on the outside of the Fence, you'll need to fight your way behind enemy lines and wage war against an enemy beyond compare.
In other words, it's time to melt some plastic. The screen controls are accomplished with the analog sticks, and 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, and 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, and you'll see that 3DO took the complexity of a RTS and put it into an easily controllable package. Like all RTS games, this centers on base building, resource collection, and unit-to-unit warfare. After learning how to create simple things like a Barracks or a Garage, you'll get access to 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 see that they put it all into a PS2 title, something I previously thought improbable.
The action is pretty quick, a big bonus in my opinion. In the case of Westwood, they found that 'balancing high' and giving every trooper a lot of kill potential helped the game, and I think they've 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, and you'll start to earn new intelligence files, which you can access from the main menu. Displaying information and units from the game, these files are a neat little extra. Even better, each mission has a series of objectives, which allow you to unlock more intelligence files, and even other missions to play in your meantime between campaign missions. Some are unusual, others very difficult, but each of these extra missions is meant to be a nice little bonus.
The appearance of all of the characters has really been cleaned up as compared to the previous Army Men titles, and 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 like it hadn't progressed that far, with relatively small viewing distances, occasionally clippy units, and 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 to a ground angle where you see Sarge land in-scene. I loved the audio in this title about as much as I like the score to any war film, which is to say, a lot. Little sweeping pieces of composition matched perfectly with the battle cries and screams of small plastic warfare.
There are upgrades to consider and strategies foresee or plot on the spot, this RTS really does challenge you. If you like strategy games and are looking for a casual RTS, this one will definitely be worth your time. That is, if you manage to make it work and are willing to overlook the absence of some features that have become defaults in recent RTS releases. Army Men RTS. Lead you toy soldiers to battle on the kitchen table or the bedroom carpet in this cute but serious real time strategy game.
Load comments.
0コメント