Army Men - Soldiers of Misfortune

By 2008 the plastic-soldier war had been over for a while. 3DO, the studio that built the Army Men brand into a shelf-filling franchise across the PlayStation and Dreamcast years, had collapsed in 2003, and the license drifted through other hands until Zoo Games put it back on store shelves at a budget price. What arrived on PS2 was a third-person shooter running on hardware two console generations old, aimed squarely at children and parents scanning the ten-dollar rack.

The premise still has the one good idea the series always had: the battlefield is a house. Toy soldiers fight across floorboards, furniture and back gardens, and the scale gag does most of the work that level design elsewhere would have to do. Objectives are simple and announced plainly, enemies come in the familiar tan plastic, and the weapon set runs from rifle to grenade to flamethrower with little in between. There is no depth being hidden here. Aim, shoot, advance, repeat.

What holds it back is not ambition but execution. Combat lacks weight, enemies soak up fire without reacting convincingly, and the camera struggles in the tight interiors that are supposed to be the whole point. Level geometry is blocky even by late-PS2 standards, and the presentation carries the flat, unpolished look of a project built to a price rather than a vision. The Wii and DS versions got most of the attention at release; the PS2 edition was there because the PS2 was still selling, not because the game demanded that audience.

Judged as what it is, though, it is not hostile to a young player. Checkpoints are forgiving, the violence is bloodless by design, and the tone stays on the toy side of war rather than the war side of toys. That was always the franchise's most defensible instinct, and it survives here in a diminished form.

For anyone curious about how licensed properties end rather than begin, this is a clean specimen. The series that once shipped several entries a year, with its own real-time strategy spin-offs and air-combat variants, finished as a modest budget shooter with the sound of somebody's mother calling from upstairs. The toys outlasted the company that animated them, which is roughly what you would expect of plastic.