Everywhere With Plastic ‘Copter: Army Men: Air Attack (1999) | Journeying with 3DO’s Army Men, Part V
“I will try to fight them / I will let them nowhere to go”
For as long as I’ve written these Army Men reviews (which is to say: About six months), there has not been a lot of stark contrasts and drastic changes from game to game. Army Men is not a land of contrasts, but more a land of nuance, and it’s nuance in the form of poorly thought out worldbuilding and half-cooked gameplay mechanics.
In spite of that, Army Men: Air Attack is a vastly different game from the rest of the Army Men video game family. In my last writing I mentioned how Army Men: Toys in Space represented a low point for me in covering this series with how poorly it masks itself as nothing more than a cash-grab, Army Men: Air Attack is its opposite in a way. We are now in the sixth game in the Army Men franchise and the final Army Men game of the second millennia. It is the second game in the Sarge’s Heroes spinoff line that started several months earlier. Although it’s described as a spinoff, it’s starting to take on a Persona-like path where the spin-off is bigger than the main franchise itself.
Air Attack is a familiar song: The Green and Tan’s war with each other rages on, and ‘secret’ weapons are in play: Both nations have discovered the magic and destructive potential of Igor Sikorsky’s whirly-birds. Air Attack has you man those whirly-birds and fly them across the land in the hopes of effectively crushing the Tan Army, and crush them you do.
Air Attack (from accounts of friends) borrows liberally from the Strike line of helicopter action games. Flying is straightforward as can be on the DualShock, and there is no input to control the altitude of the helicopter which I was dismayed about initially, but it’s a decision made for the sake simplicity and I’m glad for it.
Helicopters are still in an experimental phase in the plastic world, and heading the operation of this ‘experimental’ arm of the Green Army is Captain William Blade. He’s also a bit of a departure from the previous games, as he is the one you play as for all of Air Attack.
With Captain Blade in the co-pilot’s seats are a couple of different characters: ‘Woodstock’ (based off of musician Jimi Hendrix, which given Hendrix’s stance on war, is either a result of bad self-awareness or bad humor), a Southern rancher in ‘Rawhide’ and the wILd soldier trope in ‘Hardcore’.
The supporting cast of Air Attack carries some potential and makes it hit the sweet spot of the past games giving you a straightforward but barebones action game, or half-baked ideas that do not add any significant changes to the game itself.
Each co-pilot carries their own specialty: Having Woodstock ride in the other seat makes the machine guns on the helicopter fire faster, Rawhide specializes in the winch and makes the helicopter acquire pickups far more quickly and so on. Though I stuck with Woodstock to accompany me in the frontseat as I found his machine-gun skill to be efficient in combat, I appreciated that the team on Air Attack invested time and effort into trying to suit different playstyles. And as an aside, one of the funniest things in the game is Sarge is also a co-pilot that is unlocked just before the final mission, but he is arguably the worst person to have riding shotgun as he doesn’t bring a whole lot to the table.
There’s little to talk about with Air Attack’s story and I do not wish to write about it any more. It’s a fare I’ve written about (at this point) for this blog’s entire existence. It does, at the very least, do its best at cashing in checks from games past and try to settle the qualms I’ve had regarding the laws and nature of the Army Men universe.
The portal between the Plastic World and the Human World is an aspect of the universe that’s existed since the inception of the series and one 3DO hasn’t really made efforts to justify its existence or made any discernible difference between the two worlds. The Plastic World exists largely as a bland landscape of familiar mountain ranges, forests, towns and bayous, but with plastic people living in it. The laws of physics and nature are identical to ours.
Air Attack still doesn’t provide wholly satisfying answer questions or dole out compelling details about the ins and outs of the Plastic World, but it’s more than 3DO has provided in past iterations of the franchise. I’ve noted before that the Army Men franchise is usually at its best when it leans more into the bizarre, and Air Attack does that while trying to justify the existence and expand on the rules of the Plastic World: An inanimate teddy bear from the Human World comes alive and transforms into a terrifying weapon the moment it crosses over into the Plastic World, and new attack helicopters are assembled from those small R/C kits you see in the stores; the Tan Army use a pretty dastardly tactic of dunking captured enemy soldiers into a tub of sand colored paint and from there they emerge as fresh Tan Soldiers. I hoisted a glazed donut and dropped them nearby on an enemy platoon and watched ants crawl up and devour them. Plastic problems require creative solutions.
It’s all nonsensical and absurd, but they make some sort of sense and there is a breadth of wild and enjoyable visuals in this game that I found myself earnestly going 'Oh that’s pretty cool' at multiple points. There’s some genuinely clever stuff in Air Attack, and it makes it such a fresh experience even though this is the fifth game in the franchise in a little over 18 months.
Sadly (And I can’t believe I’m saying this), Air Attack is a brief affair: It is a little over two hours long on normal difficulty. This was the first time I didn’t deploy cheats in an Army Men game in quite a while, but that’s not to say the mission design is lackluster; there’s a smart balance between what you do in the Plastic World and the Human World, and they put a few different spins on different mission types. The team on Air Attack is given more room to maneuver this time, and it produces an honest-to-goodness fun Army Men experience, even if it is a shorter one than the rest.
Army Men: Air Attack is the final plastic soldier video game of the second millennium, and it soars into the setting sun of the 1900s having accomplished its mission with flying colors. However, as a new millennium dawns, doom is not far, and it is not in the form of the Millennium Bug.
