Army Men: Sarge's Heroes (Nintendo 64)

Reviewed by

Joe Fielder

on 10/13/1999

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Page 2

You probably won't need to get close to too many troops, though, since the autotargeting is set so you can pick off enemies situated in towers simply by firing in their general direction. That was in place in Army Men 3D, but you weren't really able to get away with just running around blasting opposing forces because you'd get eaten up by machine-gun fire. Now, while enemies still fall with one shot, your character is a lot tougher, and health-restoring power-ups can be found all over the place. It's true the first title was harder than it needed to be, but the sequel is easy to the point where the main challenge lies in dealing with the camera.

Your character now has a nice plasticine look that wasn't in the PlayStation game, but otherwise, the graphics in Sarge's Heroes are pretty poor. The environments are sparsely populated and are painted in bland-looking textures that are reused often, and the enemy is hard to distinguish from other objects at a distance, even using the sniper sighting. If you use the RAM Pak and change the resolution to high and letterbox, the visuals are bumped up to average (although fog blankets the environment), but if you don't, expect sub-first-generation N64 graphics. The sound effects are also similarly bad. Explosions, weapon fire, and your character's Duke Nukem-esque chatter all sound muffled, the military-themed music is tinny, and the songs repeat too much. The multiplayer mode now allows for four players at once, and the levels are laid out better than before, but the camera problems are even more frustrating when you have an even smaller section of the screen, making it something you'll largely ignore.

In short, the sequel is not as good of a game as the original. What needed to be fixed from Army Men 3D has either been ignored or overcompensated for, and what was already fixed is now broken. Stop the franchise, I want to get off.