Army Men: Sarge's War (GameCube)

CNET editors' rating: 2.5 stars OK
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Overall score: 5.1 (2.5 stars)
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Gamespot editors' review

• Reviewed by: Alex Navarro
• Reviewed on: 09/08/2004
• Released on: 08/21/2004

When publisher 3DO went out of business last year, many figured that the company's inviolable Army Men brand would simply disappear right along with the company. That was until budget publisher Global Star Software came swinging to the rescue and took over the Army Men brand. Army Men: Sarge's War is the first Army Men game to appear under the Global Star name, and it sticks to basically the same level of quality for which most of the other Army Men games are known. Unfortunately, that isn't really saying much, and considering that there are literally dozens of better third-person-perspective, run-and-gun shooters on the market right now, it makes it pretty tough to recommend Sarge's War.

Yes, it's official, Army Men is back...

In Sarge's War, you play as Sarge, a gruff, battle-hardened, plastic soldier who commands a squad within the Green army. Like in the previous Army Men titles, your antagonists are the vile Tan army. However, Sarge's War actually starts out with the two sides working toward a peace agreement, with only a small sect of the Tan military holding out. Of course, this small sect almost immediately turns into a much larger threat, and eventually, it will be up to you to become an army of one, as it were, and smash up the renegade Tans. As much as this might sound like the makings of a good, old-fashioned shoot-'em-up, the action in Sarge's War sadly doesn't quite live up to the premise.

The biggest fault in Sarge's War is unfortunately with the gameplay and control design. The game controls basically like your typical third-person shooter, but with a couple of poorly conceived differences. Instead of going the usual route of having a trigger button as your fire button, the developers assigned this function to the GameCube's A button and set up a strafe modifier and an autolock target to the R and L triggers, respectively. This control scheme is a little wacky to get used to at first, and if you just decide you hate it, there are a couple of alternate schemes available from which you can choose. However, no matter what scheme you choose, your ability to control Sarge is absolutely dreadful. Sarge himself handles far too squirrelly, and the aiming mechanics aren't much better.

The auto-aim feature, while seemingly able to catch the closest target, doesn't seem to help much, except when using weapons with a wide fire-spread, such as the shotgun, or with a tight firing scope, such as the sniper rifle. Everything else seems to just hit or miss at random. The game also completely lacks any sort of useful cover mechanics. Yes, you can duck, but unless you're behind an especially sturdy object that won't blow up, it basically does you no good, as you can't shoot or even peer around corners, or do anything else that you can do in even the most rudimentary shooters these days.

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Amazon.com	$19.79	Yes
Amazon.com Marketplace	$18.00	Yes
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