This union of iffy lock-on and unwieldy camera - coupled with the AI 'Tan' army troops' erratic movement patterns - also makes it rather fiddly to use anything other than the Assault Rifle or the default Carbine popgun. It doesn't help that locking onto enemies is a bit of a lottery and sometimes - usually when the going's actually tough - the game actually looks the wrong way when you lock-on if you're not facing the enemy already. But the process of doing this is exacerbated by the over-sensitive analogue sticks, which have the brutish-looking Sarge pirouetting on the spot, getting caught in doorways and generally looking or running somewhere other than where you want. The game is a very basic third-person shoot-'em-up affair that involves navigating short chunks of level brimming with identikit enemies and repetitive objectives and then pressing B when you reach the exit. Wrestling with the camera - and movement in general - is certainly a common theme. And while the dev team seems to have grasped the obvious two-stick third-person movement of most games and mapped lock-on to the left trigger, apparently it's a better idea to map 'fire' to A than the right trigger, so you're forced to swing your right thumb back and forward between firing and wrestling the camera under control. There's a four-player deathmatch mode, for example, and the game is Xbox Live 'aware', but ne'er the twain shall meet.
This is exactly the same sort of formulaic run-and-gun crud that we're used to - boring to look at, tedious to play, unadventurous to the very last and often just plain daft. In fact, if 3DO's name were on the box and not Global Star's, it wouldn't be much of a surprise.
And, well, it's certainly a worthy follow-up. But that's what happened, and the cheap and cheerful Army Men: Sarge's War is the first result. What we're trying to say, really, is that we don't completely understand Take-Two budget label Global Star's decision to buy up the franchise during the recent 3DO car boot sale, and resurrect the likes of Sarge and, er, well, you know, all the others. Ubiquitous and generally half-arsed, they became something of a joke amongst the hacks over the years, particularly with those who'd followed the franchise from the very start of 3DO's ill-fated plastic putsch. The Army Men brand may well apply to the toy soldiers we played with for all of ten minutes at some point in our youth, but as we've grown older it's become far more synonymous with mediocre videogames.
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