Army Men

This was the first video game I ever owned myself so nostalgia may well tint my opinion but I think this is a great game. The game play is fast paced in some parts but each level requires good planning and recon to accomplish well. The awesome looking planning maps available for each mission help with this and are definitely one of my favourite details of the game. The plastic aspect of this game also serves to make the experience all the more fun and memorable, with flamethrowers actually melting your opponents into little plastic puddles. Even if you're not a fan of the later games in the series I would thoroughly recommend giving this title a try, it focuses much more on your individual character, with control over other squad members limited to 'follow', 'attack here' and 'defend here' commands. I prefer this system as, to me, it lead to a more fluid control system. Overall, I highly recommend this game.

This game is very entertaining. It has aged moderately so I would recommend first thing to mute the music, and alter the keyboard setting. After this the game is very fun, the tactics and weapons are in full swing here, using the rocks for cover. Destructible Trees, fences and Walls really adds to the atmosphere that you are in a real war with plastic little men, that melt, snap and shatter into little bits. To keep this short, even if you never played this game its worth a go for the price point. It does have a bit of age to it and the functions are limited due to its age but very effective.

I absolutely adore this series, and would have given it five stars without hesitation. However, I have so far been unable to get past an immediate crash-to-desktop in Army Men, so I can only give this version three stars. Most people seem to run this one without much issue, so your mileage may vary. That all said, if you're buying this along with Army Men II and Toys In Space on sale and you've got good memories of the series, it's absolutely worth picking up, as the other two have worked right out of the box and are as chock-full of melty plastic goodness as you remember.

The premise of Army Men is the same basic story that filled every child's mind when he or she played with plastic army men as a kid - the Green Nation and the Tan Nation are bitter enemies fighting a war spanning multiple fronts.  In this first game, you're introduce to four factions - the Green Army, the protagonist nation; the Tan Army, the antagonist nation; the Grey Army, third faction at war with both the Green and the Tan; and the Blue Army, a seemingly neutral faction that aids whatever country pays for their espionage services.  Although the role of the Blue and especially Grey armies isn't clarified much in the first game, the impression I get is that the Grey Nation just kind of got pulled into the war as fighting between the Green and Tan spilled over into their territory; towards the end of a game, you fight in a town in which a retired Grey colonel resides. The game consists of three campaigns.  You begin on the desert western front repelling the initial Tan invasion where you learn about a mysterious three-part "key" to a secret Tan super weapon.  After acquiring the first part of the key, you learn from a Blue spy that the Tan are keeping the second key component at a mountain base on the northern front.  After a few daring missions to rescue Green POWs, you acquire the key and learn from one of the prisoners you freed that the Grey Army is in possession of the third key piece in the bayou region which is engulfed in a fierce three-way fight on the southern front between Green, Tan, and Grey forces.  After attacking the Grey base where the key piece is being stored, you help evacuate a Grey defector - the retired colonel I mentioned earlier - in exchange for information on the location of the ancient "portal" that this key unlocks. Obviously I have a deep love for this game, but in all fairness, it's not an especially "good" game.  Visually it definitely shows its age, and the sound design is pretty atrocious.  The sound effects themselves are okay, but the voice acting is really bad (and there's not FMV to make it "so bad it's good"), and the music is truly horrific.  Each campaign location has its own ten second clip that is repeated endlessly.  The desert is by far the worst since it's literally just a simple slow tempo snare drum beat.  Ten seconds of it.  Repeated endlessly.  The controls also take some getting used to.  Unless you're navigating menus, calling in an air strike, or calling in paratroopers, you can forget about the mouse entirely.  You use the arrow keys to move forward and backwards as well as rotate your aim clockwise and counterclockwise (I remapped these to WASD), the function keys to select between your rifle, your secondary weapon, and your special weapon (I remapped these to the number row), and the spacebar to fire.  It only takes a mission or two to get used to the control scheme, but it feels really awkward until you do get used to it.