I'm trying to think of a more useless video game franchise than the series of Army men games that plagued the video gamesphere for way longer than it ever needed to. How did this happen? I can't have a Dark Chronicle 3, but the planet demanded a Sarge's Heroes 2? Who had compromising photos? What skeletons were revealed? Are these games even bad? Well, that's probably a collective topic for another day, but I'm going back to where it all started with the very first game, Army Men 3D.

After 3DO closed the door on hardware manufacturing, The 3DO Company restructured their resources and opted to become a third party developer. While Heroes of Might & Magic was a popular series, the Army Men line of games were their biggest hit, spanning more than 15 games from the late 90's and the early 2000's. The question I'm left with is...WHY? The entire premise feels like a Toy Story joke (the movie was four years old by the time this was released) that maybe three people in a boardroom laughed at during the pitch for fear of losing their jobs. This was 1999, a year after Small Soldiers hit theaters. For perspective on how completely asinine it is that this made enough money to spawn sequels, Syphon Filter was released a month after, and that plays significantly better.

What makes this completely bizarre is, you'd think Army Men 3D would be a giant punchline, but the game plays itself straight like a third person military shooter. The only tongue-in-cheek jokes in the game seems to be melting the soldiers with flamethrowers, and a 2-player Vs stage that takes place in a child's bedroom. Instead, you're in actual terrain, friggin forests, deserts, and jungles fighting extradition.

Not even a backyard with a sandbox hiding among toys or a playground. I know the material for satire is paper thin here, and granted, the sequels at least capitalized on humor attempts [poorly], but this may as well have been Spec Ops: Stealth Patrol with very stiff controls. 

So how is Army Men 3D as a game? I'm having a meltdown trying to piece together what this even is, but for its time, it was incredibly average. It doesn't do anything completely horrible, nor does its strongest qualities make it stand out from anything else you've played around this time period. It's maddening to think I grew up in a time where every game didn't automatically support dual analog stick functionality. Army Men 3D is compatible with Dualshock, but after 22 years of using the right analog stick to adjust the camera and my inert senses to move it yielding no results, it feels empty. Sheesh, we used Dreamcast controllers with ONE oddly placed analog stick. I can assure the younger generation, these were dark days. It was just harder to realize that.   

Graphically, it's not bad for its time, just very splotchy to look at. It's fully 3D rendered, and I'll give credit where it's due to see PlayStation games completely utilize polygonal texture mapping for entire games. Blocky as it may be it is impressive. But Army Men looks like one of those Caramel Apple Lollipops that melted in the backseat of a Honda Accord in May smeared across an entire canvas.

The character models, you'll never be close enough to them to get a good look at them, so how important should the dev team the accuracy of little plastic guys? The tan soldiers often blend in with the sand and dirt, so more than a few times, you'll have a hard time distinguishing between them and a jaggy outcropping until they start firing at you. The frame rate has mood swings, going form 50 to 15 as soon as action picks up. It's disappointing that the theme ultimately feels underutilized and this ends up being one of the brownest games in the PSX library. Your life bar is the little soldier toy holding up the bayonet, because I can't tell if this game lacks self-awareness or is completely full of it and is just screwing around with me.

The controls are older than the Giza Pyramids. Thankfully, auto-targeting swoops in and saves the day. You can crouch, duck, roll, and crawl, but all I do is keep rolling if I find myself in a pickle. Your life bar can be depleted in two seconds if a mounted gun hits you, and it's tricky to tell how much damage you're taking at a given period. Plastic chunks fly off of your soldier to indicate that you're being hit, but when the action picks up, there can be a delay. The little green man isn't the most agile character to control. There's no 180 or 90 degree turn, so movement is just sluggish enough to feel unresponsive. I think I hate using grenades and demolition weapons like explosives and mines. It feels like I put myself in greater danger just setting up proximity mines and would rather gun things down with my assault rifle. For grenades, you get a reticle to indicate your throw trajectory, and I swear there's a delay that messes up the timing. Might be a pet peeve, but it's not very refined. Vehicles are clunky as hell to use, the jeeps accelerate instantly and come to a complete stop the second they touch an object.

I remember having a little bit of fun playing it back in the day. It was also a game that as soon as I was done with it, I never really felt a desire to play it again. Like Battletanx on N64, Army Men defines mediocrity in every facet. Okay graphics, not really any audio noteworthy to speak of, there's a little ambience and some militaristic drumrolls and fanfare when you successfully proceed in your missions. The difficulty is fairly standard, there's some ebbs and flows, your objectives seldom stand out from each other (rescue, dispatch, disarm). 

Is it worth playing? Eh, you'd have more fun doing virtually anything else, but it wouldn't harm you to try it out. I'm more disappointed how much of a misfire it really is at cracking jokes. I'd say just go find General Chaos for the Sega Genesis and play that instead. Or one of the other games. THAT'S the other thing, the other sequels and spin-off aren't amazing either! Whatever "potential" the devs and fans saw in this series mystifies me. I'm rambling now, I'll stop...