Plastic War, Now In Technicolor: Army Men II (1999) | Journeying Through 3DO’s Army Men, Part II

Last time I talked about Sarge, I talked about him entering a portal into our world, a world where he, his friends and his foes are actually miniaturized plastic soldiers.

Army Men II is where Studio 3DO decided “Alright, let’s get serious about these plastic men everyone” and the result is what I will generously call an acceptable tactics game that is leaps ahead of Army Men I albeit continues to be underwhelming as a whole.

When I discussed Army Men previously, I talked about how it was a game that aside from being visually bland and barebones story-wise, was also designed and built as if it was made for a platform other than PC.

With the cancellation of the Panasonic M2 behind them, Studio 3DO this time built Army Men II with PC as the sole focus. There are no drastic changes to the fundamental design from Army Men I, but no longer is mouse control constrained: you are free to move the cursor around and aim at specific targets (I still moved Sarge with a combination of WASD + mouse, though) and they have adopted a Syndicate style (and more legible) UI where you can see and select individual members of your squad. Did I mention you can now save your game at any point? That’s a huge improvement and made me realize that so far, this is the best Army Men game.

Squad and tactical aspects are also expanded as Studio 3DO finally let you control squad members individually while also giving you the ability you assist them with medkits and specific commands. After fruitless attempts at tactical play in the previous game, Army Men II rewarded my tactical galaxy brain with a successful bridge defense that saw two of my squad beating back an armored assault on the south end while I patrolled the north end and took care of demo crews involved in some bad business. Squads in general aren’t the grim, nameless and swiftly expendable units they used to be in the first game and there’s actually a nice incentive to keep them alive as long as you can, as having more firepower lets you cut down enemy units easily.

There are flipsides to this of course in the form of you and your squad literally being stuck and unable to move: If you come into contact with any other object in the game, it immediately throws your character into a 180 and makes them run the other way, which I imagine is them trying to solve the issue of getting stuck in environments in the first game but this isn’t any better. There are multiple occasions where I found myself trapped because my squad wouldn’t move, and I had nowhere else to go until I untangled the situation by moving each squad member away individually.

The tactical aspect also remains bare as there are no ambush setups or marking targets to hit in one fell swoop. An XCOM, Commandos or Syndicate-like this is not. The best I can say for it is that it is at least playable and, amazingly, fun in spots.

Now that you can engage in more satisfying plastic, tactical action, you’re probably wondering what sights and action you’ll see as a result of signing up for 3DO’s plastic army. And there are — to Studio 3DO’s credit — a lot more sights and action to take in this time around.

Army Men II continues the story of the Green Army’s ongoing plight against the Tan Army, but as we saw in the end of Army Men I, things take a turn for the bizarre when Sarge and Tan leader General Plastro enter a portal that sees the plastic grunts in a new world — our world (which I will herein call the Human World)— a world where they are (finally) small-scale plastic soldiers. While Sarge and Plastro get their bearings, Tan officer Major Mylar enters the picture, who is planning to overthrow Plastro and run the Tan Army while eliminating Sarge and taking advantage of whatever new technology these portals grant them.

Whereas Army Men I’s story is told against uninteresting backdrops of green and beige, Army Men II does not hesitate to revel in the colorful, bizarre, and sometimes playful even if most of it seems like it will not go anywhere.

There’s promise early on in Army Men II, and it’s the first time in the series where its conceit shows potential. The game opens with Sarge and his squad on a kitchen counter looking to escape the strange world they’ve stumbled on, and there’s novel ideas in this opening level: There’s navigational hazards like a stove that alternates between on and off, new enemies like roaches and there’s more flavor to the environment as you run across this countertop.

There is a strange appeal to punching holes into white fences and kitchen appliances, and having to navigate a squad around a garden hose on a green lawn while roaches swarm around is an entertaining visual by itself. Finishing the first level and being met with more traditional terrain, I hoped that the missions in the traditional terrain of islands, deserts and forests would be brief, and unfortunately it is not.

It’s a shame that out of the twelve missions in Army Men II, only a third of them are set in real world locations and the rest are set in places where the plastic soldiers are normal scale. They’re not a drab mess of brown and olive green, or a slog to trudge through as was the case in the last game, but it’s still not interesting comparatively. There’s also a strange Heart of Darkness / Apocalypse Now mission in a game about plastic soldiers, so it’s not all bland I guess?

I do admire Army Men II’s brief dips into the bizarre, some of which involve Grey Army scientist Dr. Madd creating some gruesome Frankenstein plastic creatures made out of the body parts of different soldiers. It would’ve been more fitting to have a human teen doing the zombie bits, but I digress.

There’s also some very interesting fail screens in Army Men. I’m not going to lie: All of them were entertaining to watch, even if one of them (The monkey scene) makes no sense contextually. For a game rated ‘Everyone’, it is also both bizarre and quite disturbing if you are a child.

I was entertained by a lot of the off-kilter decisions and the gameplay improvements in Army Men II, but it also reminded me of how messy and all over the place the overall direction in Army Men was.

For a series focused on Real Combat with Plastic Men, it also became too concerned with the interdimensional portal aspect of its story, which in turn resulted in you playing in a lot of uninteresting environments in a series where you expected to play as toy solders in the human world.

Army Men II is at its strongest when they make the weird lore they’ve made for the series take a backseat and just let you play as a plastic soldier in the Human World, but you only experience that world for a fraction of the game. Whether that’s a result of Studio 3DO not having a sufficient art budget to create levels in the Human World, them needing to finish the game less than a year after the first one shipped, these are all creative decisions that were thought through, or all of the above, we will never know.

At the end of the day, Army Men II is far more focused, far more colorful, and plays far better than the game that preceded it, but it’s also Studio 3DO continuing to squander a conceit that could be fairly promising and entertaining. It is the best Army Men game by far, but that doesn’t seem so impressive when you consider that the bar is so low that even a plastic army man could clear it.