Army Men - Sarge's Heroes 2

A kitchen counter is a legitimate battlefield here. Sarge Hawk, all of an inch and a half tall, takes cover behind a cereal box while Tan riflemen pop out from behind the toaster, and the game's whole appeal sits in that gag: real domestic spaces rebuilt at plastic-soldier scale, where a dripped puddle of water is a lake and a sandbox is a desert campaign. 3DO leaned on this idea for years across a startling number of Army Men releases, and this is one of the few times the conceit is given rooms worth exploring rather than brown fields to trudge across.

The shooting itself is straightforward third-person work, built on a small arsenal that does exactly what its labels promise. The flamethrower is the one that matters, because plastic melts, and watching a Tan trooper sag into a shapeless blob is the closest the series ever came to a signature effect. Bazookas, mortars and grenades round it out. Objectives run to the usual escort-and-destroy checklist, and the AI is dim enough that patience beats tactics almost every time.

It arrived on PS2 in the console's first months, and it shows. This is a Nintendo 64 and PlayStation game given a coat of higher-resolution paint rather than a project built for the new hardware, and the camera in particular fights you in tight interiors in a way that 2000 already found dated. Draw distance is generous, textures are flat, and the cutscenes deliver a cartoon plot about General Plastro, a kidnapped Blue lieutenant and portals to the human world with more enthusiasm than craft.

What survives is tone. Sarge's growled one-liners, the deliberate silliness of an amphibious assault across a swimming pool, the sense that someone on the team genuinely loved the toys they were licensing. Split-screen deathmatch on those miniature maps still raises a laugh in a room, largely because the scale joke never quite wears out. Judged as a shooter it is thin and repetitive; judged as an interactive version of what kids did on the living room floor, it lands more often than the franchise's reputation would suggest.

The series was churned out too fast and too often, and this entry carries that stamp, but it also carries the one good idea 3DO had. Nobody else was fighting a war between the fridge and the sink.