Developer: 3DO

Publisher: 3DO

Reviewed by: Ben Ivers

Do you remember making big-ass battles with your little green and tan army men? If your anything like me then you sure do and you liked to blow them up afterwards. Well this game is about those little army men and they are ready to fight each other with you in control. Sounds cool, right? Well, it is for a little while but gets tedious, very quickly.

You play the part of Sarge, obviously a sergeant, in the green army. There is a war, my friend, against the dictatorial tan government and we are boxed in and have to fight our way out through about 30 missions in 3 campaigns. You get to control other squads as well as tanks, jeeps, half-tracks, and cargo trucks. These units all look exactly the way I remember them, as well they should. You get orders from the HQ every time you accomplish the previous objective. Seems fun, but after about halfway through the second campaign I started to loose interest. Moving on, though.

As I previously said, you are Sarge and maneuver around the battlefield completing mission objectives. The controls are simple enough using the arrows to move, the spacebar to fire weapons, the numbers to select weapons and function keys to call in air strikes, air reconnaissance, and paratrooper drops. You can also use the mouse or joystick. This makes playing the game easy, which is good, because you want to spend your time playing and hating the game instead of learning the controls. You must maneuver through the battlefields going up against tan troops and essentially kill them. They do have some interesting ways of dying according to what type of weapon you use. (We will come back to this) There are 7 weapons to get your hands on, the typical rifle and auto rifle, grenades, mortars, bazookas, mines, explosives, and the overly powerful flame-thrower. Ok, back to the deaths, when a soldier is shot or blown up they shatter into a million plastic pieces, very cool; when they are burned they turn into pools of melted plastic, also very cool. Tanks, trucks, and other vehicles are tipped over with the axles and wheels flying off them like the old toys; remember? This is all very suiting and very cool but the missions begin to get very monotonous and the game begins to be a task to play, the missions almost repeat themselves. I won't say the game is too long but it sure could have been more creatively made and/or shorter. However up until whatever point you decide that the game has become boring it is entertaining to say the least.

Overall I must say the graphics of the units and vehicles are good and accurate to the toys that I played with. However the actual battlefields leave much to be desired. The desert campaign is simply desert and rocks which doesn't look too bad. But when you get to the alpine campaign, there are problems, such as no snow, frankly it looks like the desert with a white background and some trees, sometimes. The bayou is better mainly because of the presence of trees, but not much. Overall the graphics could have been better with a few other simple features, like real 3D maps.

This is where the game really shines. The multiplayer can be played over TCP/IP, LAN, Dial-up, and over Heat.net. You can play with up to four players which is very fun. The replay value of the multiplayer is very high. You get a variety of different troops to start with and can play with a couple different game options, blitz and capture the flag. These are both very fun. Teams of allies can also be made. The multiplayer is essentially the same gameplay, but more fun.

Overall this game is kind of a disappointment. I played the multiplayer demo and was awed but when the game came out and I played the single player campaigns, I quickly lost interest. So, if you can wade through the game and find it fun, more power to ya, but that's more patience than I have or desire.

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