War is hell. Weird, plastic-y hell.
The Army Men series was created by The 3DO Company, a somewhat dubious name in video game history. It was founded by the amusingly-named Trip Hawkins, who also created Electronic Arts, and began itself as the developer of an overpriced namesake multimedia platform. At the time of its release, a standard 3DO cost $700 – that’s about $1,200 in today’s dollars! You can imagine how that went.
After their hardware bombed, 3DO went on to develop and publish a few mildly successful franchises, including Army Men. The origins of the Army Men series are mildly amusing – it began with the 3DO folks developing what was shaping up to be another fairly generic shooter, but were worried about the game being censored in Germany, where violent video game content is heavily regulated. Their solution to this was to make all the characters into little plastic green army men, because as everyone knows, violence against toys is completely fine and no one has ever paid the price for hurting them.
This particular entry in the series, Sarge’s Heroes, eschews the series’ typical tactics-based gameplay in favor of a more straight-forward action experience. You play as the title “Sarge,” a member of the green army men and bitter rival of the most evil force imaginable – the tan-colored army men. The tan faction is led by General Plastro, which is the exact name I would’ve come up with if I had five seconds to come up with the name of an Army Men villain.
Sarge’s Heroes plays out as a set of usually straight-forward missions – rescue some guy, take out these other guys, etc. At least in the N64 version, the controls are pretty unwieldy, often making it difficult to fight packs of tan-colored enemies. Moving and turning simultaneously is a chore (not unlike Resident Evil’s tank controls), and aiming often feels imprecise. This balances out, in a rather frustrating sense, by the fact that the game’s AI is really, really dumb.
See how these two dopes are just standing there? Yeah, there’s a lot of this. While this does a lot to make the game feel manageable, it makes the experience feel awfully amateurish.
On a more positive note, there are a number of things that Sarge’s Heroes does with a surprising degree of competence. There’s a good variety of weapons that have varying strengths and weaknesses, and the game’s levels often give you good reason to switch between them. The graphics aren’t spectacular, but there are a few nice touches here and there, such as trees igniting when near an explosion.
Perhaps most importantly, this game makes no attempt whatsoever to take itself seriously. It has a degree of self-awareness that’s kind of refreshing, considering the sheer volume of Extremely Serious FPS Games that are commonplace these days.
The story of Sarge’s Heroes even includes a trip to the “real world,” which General Plastro wishes to conquer (note that because they’re all army men, they’re all super tiny in the real world). This is a good example of the odd charm that this game has – for all of its faults (and there are a lot of them), it just sort of works for me out of sheer goofiness. The fact that they’re dumb army men somehow makes it easier to overlook the game’s shortcomings.
There’s also a basic multiplayer deathmatch mode, which I didn’t get a chance to try. If it controls like the rest of the game does, I could see it being somewhat frustrating, but perhaps enjoyable with the right group of people.
It’s kind of difficult to fully recommend the Army Men series or Sarge’s Heroes specifically, as the genre has just so many outstanding options – even in the fairly small N64 library, there are just better options. If you like something with a bit of character, though, Sarge’s Heroes arguably deserves a look.
Next week’s game is the home version of one of my absolute favorite arcade games. We’ll see if its console counterpart is up to speed.