Just finished Army Men: RTS. I think this means that I've now finished every single Army Men game that has ever been officially released on PC. In my early teens I actually used to be a total fanboy of the series. However, in spite of that I'm perfectly able and willing to admit that the games in this series aren't great, with maybe one or two exceptions.

Army Men: RTS was released just after my fanboyism had kinda died down and I ended up never playing more than the demo until the game was released on GOG. I actually did enjoy the demo a lot and I kinda always assumed that this may have been the best game in the franchise, also because it was developed by a renowned veteran studio that had developed some great games before this and also delivered some great titles afterwards. Alas, it seems that this series is kinda cursed.

So this is your typical Command & Conquer clone. It's mostly base versus base, there's more than a dozen of unit types that are good against specific other units. The only "special" thing the game adds to the formula is that units leave behind puddles of plastic that can be harvested and used for building more units. The campaign also doesn't do anything interesting, it's mostly the aforementioned base versus base with the occasional awkward hero mission. And while there's some of that charming Army Men humour with its movie references, some black humour and whatnot, this one is pretty unimaginative and unambitious in this regard. The story and cutscenes just can't compete with some of the stuff in other Army Men games and the missions barely utilise the setting. It's really little more than a child-friendly re-skin of your typical military RTS.

The big problems lie in the gameplay of course, though. Army Men RTS kinda messed up stuff that even the first RTS games (and especially some of Pandemic's earlier games) got right. For starters: unit behaviour is dreadful. The pathfinding is simply unable to handle other units and you constantly end up with ridiculous situations where units try to push each other out of the way, going back and forth etc.. An order that should take a few seconds to execute can well take up to twenty. Sometimes a unit will seemingly decide that a move is too hard to execute and will just tell you to shove your order up your ass. This is such a fundamental problem that even if everything else were great about it I would have a hard time recommending the game.

But of course the other stuff isn't great either. There's no interesting units (and as I mentioned: both sides have the same units) and just a few missions in you've already seen it all and you will probably finish the whole game using just a handful of unit types, especially since, due to the pathfinding problems, any tactics that require more microing are a nightmare to use. The base building itself is also very dull, with only four types of buildings plus a few defensive structures. You basically have your base set up in two minutes and then it's just a matter of slowly pushing forward as you constantly heal your units. What really hurts in this game is that the second resource type, energy, is quite rare most of the time and a requirement for all vehicles. The effect this had on me personally was that I played the game very carefully, preserving vehicles at all costs, which brought this already rather slow RTS to a crawl. That sucks. The only thing that makes this game remotely challenging is that (luckily) some units are very resistant or even invulnerable to certain other units. E.g. tanks are pretty much a universal unit unless you encounter mines or helicopters, which they can't even fire at.

Additionally the game suffers from some serious UI shortcomings. For instance, you can only create four numbered groups which is pretty much inexcusable. You also can't select all units of a single type by double-clicking them. It's just weird. And even the mini map doesn't work properly. Once you've selected a unit you actually can't scroll around using the minimap. Heck, even if no units are selected you can't actually use the minimap properly because dragging the minimap results in box selection of units - I honestly think this is the only RTS I've played that does this. They inserted this useless feature there and rendered one of the classic tools of the genre useless in the process. It's crazy!

Anyway, so Army Men RTS isn't just very generic, it's actually pretty bad and sadly does, by the series' standards, very little to compensate these shortcomings via fun content. I can't honestly recommend this to anyone, even people who have a soft spot for this series like me.