"Playing With Army Men Has Never Been So Boring."
by Stuart Newsom

The concept sounds good on paper. “Let’s do a game where green army men are in a war with the tan army men! That’ll be awesome!” Well, maybe in the hands of a good game, it might be awesome. Army Men: Sarge’s Heroes is not a good game. It’s not even a bad game. In my own personal circle, it’s pretty darn close to Superman 64 levels of putrid. This third-person shooter is so plastic it’s lifeless, which is appropriate really, but it’s also so buggy, ugly and has so many basic control issues that it’s almost unplayable.

Like many games of the ilk, the story is really unnecessary. Apparently the Green Army and the Tan Army are at war and there are some portals from the plastic world to our world where the Tan army is getting weapons of mass destruction like magnifying glasses and stuff. So Sarge has to go out and save his team and the plastic world from the evils of Tan. I always knew getting a tan was a horrible thing! There’s also a training boot camp mode, where you just shoot at things with all the weapons in the game and then go through “live fire” training, where you basically instantly die. Oh joys. The real “fun” of the game comes from some of the absolute idiotic tactics and AI the game employs when facing the Tan faction.

The dread begins in the first level, where you’re base is under attack by the Tan faction and your general has been taken hostage, so it’s up to Sarge to get him back. Unfortunately, Sarge can only run in a straight line and only pivot like his feet are glued to a Lazy Susan. I know this is not the only game with pivot only turning, but guess what, those games are stupid too. I don’t want to completely stop momentum to turn to the right then start running in a straight line again. But he can strafe. Oooooh. Fancy. Anyway, that stupidity is beside the point. So Sarge starts running into the battlefield and you spot a Tan solider about 250-300 scale yards away. You pull out your rifle and shoot. Not an instant kill, but a hit. What does the tan soldier do? Does he: A) fire back B) stand there with a thumb up his butt or C) React then decide to run the full 300 yards directly towards you, get two inches away, put his gun directly in your face, then proceed to miss. If you answered C, congratulations! You win a lifetime of confusion!

In the same level, you run into a mine field. Oh NOES! That means you pull out the trusted green army man tool: the metal detector. So now you walk though this field, scanning for mines, while moving at quite possibly the SLOWEST WALK EVER. About a third of the way through, you find one…at the complete extreme of the cavern. Ooooook. So keep walking and find another one…at the other extreme wall. Repeat 9 times! So, basically, if you just ran down the middle of the cavern, as one would be prone to do, you’d go without a scratch. However, if you hugged the wall, for no real reason, then you’d get blown into many plastic pieces. Oh yeah, that makes sense.

It doesn’t help that everything is either green or tan blobs of shiny stuff (This was an “Expansion Pac” game for the N64?) and that the draw distance is about 5 feet in front of your face and on the rare occasions that you can see enough to snipe someone, whenever you hit your opponent, they decide to run directly towards you, no matter the distance. Either that or they will snipe you out first from angles and locations where it is impossible to hit them. I’m looking at you tan sniper hiding on a roll of toilet paper in the bathroom level. How can you hit me, laying down, when I’m DIRECTLY BELOW YOU?!? Especially when I see the bullet go in the complete opposite direction and it still “hits me”. BS!

Sure, the multiplayer can be fun, if you want to continue enduring the horrific controls, and the levels in the real world are fun, using blocks and rubber ducks as cover, but overall the game is so horrifically bad and boring, it’s not worth the frustration and pain. But what else do you expect from a game from the “Army Men” series?

Overall Rating: 2 out of 10