S.A.R.G.E 2K | Air Tactics, World War (2000)
It was twenty years ago today! Sarge’s Heroes taught the gang to play!
Welcome back to Sarge is Dead!, friends. The 2020s have arrived, and with that it will also have been 20 years since the games I am about to talk about came out.
As a new millennium emerges, a duo of new plastic soldier video games comes forth. And like the video games that emerged from the new millennium, it comes bearing promise, but the overall quality is uncertain. And just as something gets started, something ends. Air Tactics and World War are The 3DO Company’s final Army Men installments on the personal computer.
This is also the beginning of the final stretch of them being involved in Army Men. And as four wise men once said, plastic soldiers have gone in and are now going out of style.
CAPITULO UNO: Army Men: Air Tactics (2000)
Air Tactics is our first taste of plastic soldiers in the new millennium, and it is difficult to tell whether this or Air Attack came first given that this is essentially a PC adaptation of Air Attack, but using the isometric engine of the Army Men real time tactics games.
It shares a lot of the same ideas as Air Attack, but adapted for a 2D isometric view, and is more akin to the Strike games of yore than Air Attack was. It’s interesting because there’s more mobility and less tactical decisions to be made, so the game moves at a much faster pace. I appreciate the swiftness of everything is, but much like other video games on the personal computer: Air Tactics is hard. It is the Dark Souls of Army Men games. And it’s frustrating in the way where there’s often two, sometimes only one optimal path and navigating that path is exceedingly hard, and there isn’t a lot of satisfaction to be gained when you complete them.
It’s a dang shame because Air Tactics has some things going for it. I love 2D isometric video games and I love helicopters, and there’s some genuinely neat things to be experienced in Air Tactics, but getting to those requires banging your head against the wall and hoping that this slight deviation in your path gets you through a mission. Coupled with the fact that it was a technical nightmare to play Air Tactics on current PCs, much less trying to get past the main menus each time. My brain can only take so much of a plastic soldier beating that unfortunately, Air Tactics will be the first Army Men game I will not complete.
CAPITULO DOS: Army Men: World War (2000)
In 1998, Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan showed in theaters for the first time. For the next decade, it influenced the plethora of first-person shooters starting with Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, which then resulted in Call of Duty about two years later. But while Allied Assault is considered a seminal moment in first-person shooters, what truly started the Saving Private Ryan inspired video game boom is 2000’s Army Men: World War.
In spite of this newfangled inspiration, Army Men: World War is a sad, six hour collection of the driest, most uninspired interpretation of Saving Private Ryan that I’ve seen, and I’ve experienced a lot of them growing up.
World War plays out like the other Army Men games on the personal computer. It is a real-time tactics game, it is isometric, it does not seem cut out to be a fun playing real-time tactics game. There are no improvements to be found here from Toys in Space or Army Men II. It inherits the same technical warts from those games, it has the exact same visual assets as those games.
I have no desire to continue pointing out the flaws in this game, and there is only so much amusement you can extract from doing an in-depth dunking on a franchise like this. The only thing I can do is surmise the conditions at 3DO during this era and what was asked of its employees during this time, which judging solely from the release dates of these games, seem like a rough time. I could not find a lot of info surrounding 3DO at this time, so speculating is all you and I can do.
World War may be a bad game, but throughout my time with it it was interesting to take the perspective of a 3DO dev who has been tasked to try and complete a game in a space of four months, print labels, call up a facility to mass produce CDs, create promotional material and send it out to retailers, magazines and then repeat that cycle for the rest of the year. It’s difficult to track down people from that time now, and it’s also difficult to see who made the decision that 3DO’s dev cycle was going to be this. Was it Trip Hawkins himself? How involved was he in making this games and making decisions for these games? Was he present at the 3DO offices in Redwood at all, or was he gallivanting in Northern California inside his vintage Chevy? And who exactly is this “Clifton Beaumont III” that lost four of his jobs to 3DO games that they recruited for this ad?
These are only a few of the many questions I have for 3DO about Army Men, and I’m not sure if they will ever be answered. All I can do for the moment — like a good soldier — is press onward with this quest to play all these games.
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