The Enemy, Now (Begrudgingly) My Friend: Army Men 3D & Sarge’s Heroes (1999) | Journeying Through 3DO’s Army Men, Part III

After years of anticipation, 3DO’s flagship series Army Men finally makes it to home consoles. You’re probably tired of me speculating that the Panasonic M2 and Army Men has ties, and bad news: I will not stop bringing that up until I’m finished talking about Army Men or Trip Hawkins or someone who was at 3DO tells me otherwise.

Army Men 3D is 3DO’s first home console game where their own hardware wasn’t the sole focus of development. Studio 3DO pooled all of their resources for Army Men 3D into developing for the Sony PlayStation, which made sense at the time considering that the PlayStation was practically the console to beat in the market at the time.

This information seems trivial. But consider some things that 3DO founder Trip Hawkins said in an interview with Next Generation Magazine in 1996:

Next Generation Magazine: Why not publish yourselves on PlayStation? It’s surely the next-generation market leader…

Trip Hawkins: Put it this way, if I thought that PlayStation was going to be a really large market and I thought it was going to extend far enough into the future, then we would publish for it ourselves. I don’t believe that, so I’m happy to let somebody else have the rights and we’ll just get some money out of it. We’d rather concentrate our resources on platforms that have greater long-term value.

-Next Generation Magazine, Issue 22

I will cut Trip some slack here: He said this as the M2 project was still afloat, and the PlayStation was relatively new; it had only been out for a year in the U.S. and the library wasn’t the one we know today. Also for as wrong as this statement is in hindsight, Trip Hawkins sounded like a very knowledgeable guy when it came to predicting the flow of hardware and how the market in the console space would shape out: He mentions in the same interview that he believes a box that was both a video game console and a DVD player could exist in about three years, and run for the low, low price of $199. DVDs were still in a nascent stage at that point and weren’t exactly as accessible as they were about half a decade later. In 2000 the PlayStation 2 shipped, was priced at $199, could run video games and could play your DVDs.

That being said, this quote is very funny, and becomes a lot more funny when you consider that in about six years time two-thirds of the 3DO published Army Men games were on the PlayStation.

CAPITULO UNO: Army Men 3D

Now, what does 3DO’s first foray into the PlayStation like? For starters, it carries the same plot as a game they released not even a full calendar year ago at the time of release (So I will not delve into its details as I already have), but converted into a 3rd person shooter instead of a 2D isometric tactical shooter.

Army Men 3D plays as straightforward as possible and looks as straightforward as possible. The lack of visual interest is either a homage to the original Army Men or just the limitations of 3DO’s tech for the PlayStation (I am leaning towards the latter), but it’s hard to say exactly. The fog to hide the short draw distance is prevalent, there is very little to look at in the levels and none of them are set in the Human World, which is a disappointment, although this helps a lot with the frame-rate which I will get into later with Sarge’s Heroes.

When I said that Army Men 3D plays straightforwardly, I meant it: You use the d-pad / analog stick to run, X fires your weapon, and you use L2/R2 to strafe. There is a variety of weapons to cycle through and sometimes a vehicle, but going through on foot is often the best course of action and I spent most, if not all of the game using the standard rifle provided to you from the jump. It sounds crude, and initially it is not compelling but over time it becomes clear that complexity is not this game’s strong suit.

There’s also the fact that Army Men 3D is easily exploitable. One mission tasked me with destroying a train tunnel. The path to the tunnel was heavily defended with tanks and machine gun emplacements and possibly a battalion of Tan soldiers. This plays as a huge challenge if you’re playing conventionally, but at that point I had picked up long ago that Sarge runs slightly faster than enemy bullets and that any enemy firing at Sarge running full sprint from a right angle is never going to hit him. So a mission that was possibly meant to be 10–15 minutes long lasted 45 seconds as I made a beeline for the tunnel, dropped the TNT and demolished it, all without firing a single shot. I repeated this process again in the next mission where an objective (which was a key that needed to be picked up) was defended by three tanks. I made a beeline once more for the objective, picked up the key and the mission was deemed a success.

Playing through Army Men 3D in seven or eight hours. If there are checkpoints (which there are not), it is even less than that. When you take into account how much PlayStation 1 games were in that era (Let’s say hovering around 29–39 USD for something like Army Men 3D), that’s quite short.

Is Army Men 3D worth the 29-39 USD (Which comes out to around 70 USD in 2019) you would be paying if it was 1999? I’m going to go ahead and say no, it isn’t, although that doesn’t mean it is an irredeemable game by any means. Taking into the context of what PlayStation games were during that era and what expectations were, there is some fun to be had with Army Men 3D, especially if you’re a young child that’s always wanted to see your plastic soldiers blow up with better special effects. That being said, there is not much to write home about with Army Men 3D.

But wait, if you thought that was it for 3DO’s slate of PlayStation Army Men games in 1999, think again.

CAPITULO DOS: Sarge’s Heroes

Just a little over six months after the release of Army Men 3D came Army Men: Sarge’s Heroes. It’s a radical departure from the drab aesthetic and otherwise lack of personality the previous three Army Men games had, and has a lot more voice acting and more dives into the Human World.

Army Men: Sarge’s Heroes is an interesting direction for the franchise to take since it is 3DO trying to make Army Men more palatable to kids. You’d assume that was the point of the series in the first place, but apparently not.

The most drastic change in Sarge’s Heroes is the redesign of Sarge (Now carrying the surname of ‘Hawk’), as well as a Kelly’s Heroes-esque crew of new characters: Riff, the cool, somewhat reckless bazooka man. Hoover, a timid minesweeper. Scorch, a firestarter. Shrap, a mortar man that also is a surfer dude for some reason. And lastly Thick, the group’s support gunner that’s meant to be a sort of comic relief for this whole thing, but comes off as a little ableist.

Surrounding this cast of characters is Colonel Grimm and his daughter Vikki. Col. Grimm is meant to give the bullheaded Sergeant Hawk some direction as opposed to the faceless and barely-there voice acting of ‘Command’ in the previous games. Vikki is the only female character in the game, and she is both portrayed as being the spy character and a love interest for Sarge. She’s also interesting in that she is the only character with a regular skin tone than the rest, and you can infer from this that Vikki is likely from a different line of toys.

In light of that, Vikki is still Colonel Grimm’s daughter, which begs the question of: Who is Vikki’s mother / the colonel’s spouse? And how exactly does procreation function in the Army Men universe? Was Colonel Grimm involved in kidnapping Vikki and somehow making her believe she is his daughter? Or did he simply adopt her? Do people grow up in Army Men? Sarge’s Heroes raises a lot more questions than it does answers.

With that said, the game is a more colorful splash than the ones that came before it, although it bears a familiar story: The Tan Army’s General Plastro has attained the power to travel to other dimensions via strange portals, and through this he plans to bring back weapons of mass destruction from the Human World to aid in his quest for World Domination.

The Green Army’s Colonel Grimm orders Sarge to regroup with his squad who have been captured and try to thwart Plastro’s schemes while trying to keep his daughter Vikki from venturing into the frontlines and stay in what is essentially a propagandist role. She does however, shun this role and becomes a key part in the story later on (Although Vikki ends up having a somewhat predictable outcome by becoming the femme fatale and damsel in distress archetype)

Sarge’s Heroes plays almost identically to Army Men 3D, and consists of far more levels in the Human World this time around. The colors have also been punched up and there is an effort to create art that doesn’t just blend into the environment, although the quality is still not what I’d described as ‘great’ and also brings about the unfortunate issue of the frame rate diving to the single digits in a lot of levels with 3D objects.

Lacking gameplay and visuals be damned though, the most interesting part of Sarge’s Heroes is 3DO’s efforts to treat the story, characters and universe of Army Men as more than an afterthought. Better direction in voice acting and the use of pre-rendered cutscenes underpin 3DO’s efforts to frame the story of Sarge’s Heroes, and this is effective in at least making you interested or even care about the cast.

The writing is straightforward as is, and it mostly plays the same beats as the previous games, which would be exciting if you’re a kid experiencing Army Men for the first time on consoles, but it’s a less compelling narrative when you’re someone reviewing the fourth such Army Men game to have the same plot in under twelve months.

To try and make itself distinct, Sarge’s Heroes has more character work and interactions as well as stabs at humor, which is…well read for yourself this exchange as Sarge is about to undertake a dangerous mission:

COL. GRIMM: It’s a million to one chance, soldier.
SARGE: Sounds like good odds to me.
COL. GRIMM: It’s suicide!
SARGE: Colonel, suicide is my middle name.
SARGE: [pauses] Wait, that was my brother’s middle name. The one who…died.

While I’m on the topic of sound, the OST for Sarge’s Heroes is the best in the series, mostly because it stays consistent with having traditional military themes rather than jumping from a marching-style song to Beethoven for some reason which was the case in Army Men II.

There is also this off-brand, heavily MIDI-fied version of The Who’s “Baba O’Riley”. It even has the god damn bridge from the song.

It is also worth noting there are other versions of Sarge’s Heroes for the N64 and the SEGA Dreamcast, which is 3DO’s first venture into the next-gen console space (Although it is a port of the N64 version of the game). Those manage to look and run much better than the PlayStation version, although I could not acquire a copy of both those versions for the purposes of this review, unfortunately.

I should say that I mention this because the Dreamcast version contains an amazing ‘Making Of’ video from the Saffire Corporation, the developer that ported Sarge’s Heroes to what would be SEGA’s final home console. It is also less a video about porting the game and more a video that is clearly shilling for Saffire and Midway Publishing (who is somehow involved with publishing this for the Dreamcast), and it is a bizarre thing this bizarre video game deserves:

All in all, Sarge’s Heroes is the most interesting entry into the Army Men franchise so far: There are characters that bear personalities (for better or worse), there is a proper story that is framed with the intention of making you care about it to some degree, and they are far more interested in venturing into the Human World this time out.

But in spite of this, it is a game packaged with uninspiring and messy execution of gameplay ideas, a game that recycles the same narrative beats as the four games that preceded it.

Sarge’s Heroes and Army Men 3D still carries the 3DO curse of squandering a concept that surprisingly holds potential that, if executed even a little decently, could make good money for the company.

It becomes even more confounding when you realize 3DO is the only company in the games space that was developing these types of games. It begs several questions: Why rush these games out of production? Why put out five Army Men games within one calendar year? Why were they in a mad race to churn out as much plastic soldier games as they could when there was no visible competition from other companies?

I wish that ‘Making of’ video could answer these questions and more, but all I know is that working for Saffire Corporation and being partnered with Midway ‘rocks’.