Army Men: Major Malfunction

By Sam Leitch

The Army Men series has a bad reputation amongst gamers. Usually the games range from uninspired to pretty damn awful, which is a shame as the scenario has so much potential. It's true that 3DO have tried to tap into this potential, mostly with the humourous plastic deaths (you're able to melt soldiers with flame throwers, for example). This is only fun so many times, though, and the problem has always been that once the gimmick has worn off, there hasn’t been much else left underneath.

With the current generation of consoles, you would think that a garden shed or a child’s room would be able to be brought to life in a much more imaginative and exciting way than has ever been done before. Imagine soldiers parachuting off the bookshelf, jeeps negotiating the jumps and bumps of the bed sheet and an army of tanks ambushing from a pair of trousers left on the floor. This is the Army Men game that I have been wanting for for years, but unfortunately - judging from early impressions - all these opportunities for originality and excitement have once again been ignored. It seems once again all we will be getting are bland, sparsely populated huge open spaces. *sigh*

Look, I know it’s a budget title, but that really shouldn’t be an excuse for mediocrity. Sure, you might expect a few cut backs from a cheap game - less polygons, not quite as polished presentation and so on - but it’s not a reason to release a mindless, uninspired ‘cookie cutter’ game that doesn’t do anything we haven’t seen a million times before. Some of the best games I have played have been made by small low budget teams and have made up for any shortcoming with vision and fun gameplay.

Anywho, now we have all the ranting out of the way, here is what you can expect from Major Malfunction:

• Over 30 missions to complete
• Conquer the Story, Arena Battle and Time Trial Modes
• Destroy 23 different enemy toys with 16 lethal weapons

Jeez, that’s one large feature list!

 del.icio.us  StumbleUpon  Facebook  Reddit