Army Men: Sarge’s War review

When 3DO finally gave up on games and hardware development nobody really expected the Army Men franchise to survive. The games hadn’t sold particularly well, because they hadn’t been particularly good. To make a go of the franchise, whoever picked it up was going to need to turn out an exceptionally good title to revive interest in the name. Surprisingly, Take-Two bought up the rights and Sarge’s War is the first Army Men brand game to appear under their name.

Two Tribes

Sarge’s War sees you taking control of Sarge, who is a battle hardened leader of the green army as they fight the evil Tan army. At the start of the single player campaign the Tan and Green armies are working towards a peace agreement but, of course, there’s a Tan contingent who want to disrupt this peace process. This eventually leaves Sarge as a one man army to take on the growing threat from this breakaway Tan group. Set across three groups of missions, with each mission broken down into short segments, Sarge’s War provides a decent amount of action for the budget price. Sarge has an unlimited number of lives and the mission segments are all checkpoints so you only have to make it through the current section to have your progress saved. The segments really are too short though, and for no apparent reason. The segments generally have a mini-goal to achieve, such as clearing out a gunner or a spotter, or maybe destroying a convoy. These sub-goals are all part of a larger mission goal, which might see several segments having the same mini-goal - making the breaking of segments seem even more arbitrary.

Look Sharp Sarge

Sarge’s War certainly looks pretty. The settings are nicely detailed, with some Micro Machines style touches, such as a child’s spade being used as a bridge between two areas. The character models are also nicely rendered, although I guess it’s easier to make toys look realistic than people. The characters are suitably shiny and look plasticky. As you take or deal out damage the characters show this as holes appearing in their body, at the point that they were shot. When an enemy dies they leave behind some material which you can pick up and use as health. There are also health packs scattered throughout the level. The sound in Sarge’s War is passable. The sound effects are decent and the soundtrack doesn’t get in the way of the action. The voice acting, on the other hand, is rather poor with a caricature gruff voice for Sarge, a squeaky evil voice for the enemy and standard grunt voices for the green troops. Fortunately, you probably won’t be interested enough in the back story, possibly because the acting puts you off, to want to watch the cut scenes and there’s not too much voice over in the missions.

Taking Control

Controlling Sarge is something of an art. The controls are very sensitive and so you need to be very gentle on the left and right thumbsticks to be able to aim. The thumbsticks are used rather awkwardly, with the left being for walking forwards or turning and the right being for looking around. There’s no strafing per se. The left trigger is used to enter first person mode, for aiming, and the right is used to lock onto the nearest enemy. Holding this down will allow you to strafe but it doesn’t work terribly well. On several occasions I found that I was facing an enemy, pulled the right trigger to aim better and Sarge turned around to face the wall behind me. Even when the auto-aim doesn’t turn you around it often doesn’t lock on to an enemy, it just causes you to stay facing in vaguely the same direction you were. With the triggers in use, shooting and actions are done with the other buttons, requiring rather awkward positioning of your fingers to be able to reach the thumbstick, triggers and buttons at the same time for common actions like shooting.

Fighting with Friends

Sarge’s War has a tacked on multiplayer feature allowing up to four people to fight in an all out battle or in teams. The games available include Team Advance, Capture the Flag and Deathmatch. Without Live or System Link it only runs in split-screen, which is an odd choice given the recent standards being set for multiplayer. Sadly this mode really isn’t much good either and with only four maps, even if it was it would soon start to feel tedious.

Debutant

Sarge’s War is the first of the Army Men series to arrive on the Xbox and it might have been better had it not been. This seems finished in parts and unfinished in others. The graphics and sound are as good as I’m sure the developers intended. The cut scenes and voiceovers could be said to be intentionally cheesy/camp. The controls need working on and taking a cue from a successful third-person shooter might have helped there. The missions could use a bit more variety and the difficulty level could go up a notch or two, especially in terms of the save points. The breaking of the missions into arbitrary short sections doesn’t work for me, as I would prefer to see a large mission with sub-goals rather than what feels like lots of really short missions. All in all, it’s a missed opportunity for the Army Men franchise and one that isn’t likely to raise the name of the franchise at all. It might have been better to not salvage the license from 3DO, but since it has been they need a really good game in this series to raise the profile and be a success.