Perhaps one of the most ambitious RTS games of days gone by, TA brings a ton of units, strategies and content. Finishing ALL missions takes a LOT of time. It took me almost 115 hours! Vanilla game is good, if somewhat easy, and "Core Contingency" expansion is excellent, providing challenging content. Perhaps the weakest point of this series is "Battle Tactics" which features around 100 missions, most of which are either way too easy, or just poorly designed in general. There's maybe around 5 or 10 memorable ones in "Battle Tactics", rest feels like unimaginative copy-paste. Watch out for the one where you start with only a dozen Reaper tanks and are expected to destroy two Moho Mines. That one is actually pretty darn difficult and feels rewarding to complete. TA didn't age that well, compared to Starcraft in particular: unit pathfinding is mostly abysmal, managing large armies is a chore, and managing big groups of warships is extremely frustrating due to their terrible turn rate and weird pathing that makes units just always turn around rather than simply move forward if possible. On the other hand, you can construct cannons that fire across whole map, which is a blast. TA introduces a lot of "cool factor" taking stuff like wind or gravity into consideration when calculating projectile paths, and the animations of units exploding and turning into (salvage-able) wreckege are pretty darn satisfying to look at, even in 2020. Finally, it comes with a timeless score made by Jeremy Soule - the game is probably worth playing just to listen to the soundtrack. Thumbs up, worth every penny. If only there was a mod that fixes the awful pathfinding...
This title is just beyond bad. 1. The UI and graphics are literally copy pasted from "Army Men: Toys in Space". 2. There are countless bugs. 3. There's no Sarge. You're leading nobodies. 4. There is pretty much no music. 5. The sounds of a battlefield (meant to replace the music, I guess?) disappear when you load a game. 6. The choice to allow VEHICLES to carry over is just ridiculous. How hard can it be when you start with 10 tanks? Yeah, all you need to do is to have a soldier in a vehicle when mission ends and he carries over WITH THE VEHICLE to the next mission! 7. It literally takes 3 hours to beat the game. 8. It's just a disgrace. Total shovelware that made the once nice Army Men series a joke. 9. The graphics are worse than in the "Army Men Air Tactics" game that was released PRIOR to this one - why!? 10. The enemy AI still cannot properly respond when being attacked from long range so a single tank can kill ALL enemy troops without them even retaliating. Just fire at the edge of your range. Do NOT buy this game, even on -90% promo, ESPECIALLY if you like Army Men games - it's a total waste of time, borderline robbery from 3DO when the game was released in 1999.
Most reviewers at the time were like "OMG it's so hard, easy feels like nightmare" but in reality all you have to do is adapt. AM:TiS is not like AM2, where you just stroll forward and murder everything without a second of though. All it takes is to master two things: - the side roll (it is dramatically improved in this game compared to AM1 or AM2 because it's much more responsive, thus, can be spammed and you can shoot while rolling; the enemy will almost never hit you). - the long range weapons. AI will often not react if attacked from far away leading to easy kills, making Mortar, Bazooka and Vulcan gun especially valuable in this version. I beat it on Hard without any trouble. My complaint would be that the game has somewhat worse controls than AM2 (turning with the WASD keys is somewhat clunky) and it's REALLY easy to get stuck, even when walking towards a wall. Tip: control it with a mouse. Using WASD, I was really frustrated (I beat AM2 using WASD only). Another complaint would be that the game is way too short. I beat the campaign around 8 hours on hard. It's worth it to buy it on promotion and play a couple hours, though - IMHO it's more fun than the overly easy AM2 or the annoying (due to crippled controls) AM1.
