The launch of the Game Boy Advance was a pretty exciting time. Pushing graphics similar to the SNES felt pretty wild. And it was a great slate of games. A creatively convincing port of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2, a sequel to Super Dodge Ball, and even one-quarter of Super Mario All-Stars.

I was also excited about Army Men Advance. I had only played Sarge’s Heroes and Air Combat at that point, so I wasn’t familiar with how the series was being perceived outside of those games, and the art style was cute. I rented it. Then I didn’t think about it again until I started diving into the whole dang Army Men series for this very blog.

After I played it again a few years ago, I neglected to follow up with a review. So, I had to play it again just now, so I’d have fresh, newly-sewn memory. Thankfully, it’s short. But also, crap.

REAL DUDES. PLASTIC CARTRIDGE.

I’ve talked to a few people from 3DO, and they all say the same thing. They believe that if the games in the Army Men series didn’t have such brief development schedules, and if they weren’t pumped out at a staggering rate, the series would have done well. I agree. The most generous estimate I got in regard to development time was one year, but I’ve heard they were sometimes shorter than that.

Sometimes, the brief cooking time is incredibly obvious. And I’m not just referring to how new games in the World War sub-series were conjured every six months. There are times when a game seems to have a good approach, but landed without putting its gear down.

You can feel that with Army Men Advance. It’s a wisp of a game. You can choose to play as Vikki (no, thanks, two Portal Runner games were enough) or Sarge. I don’t think there’s a difference between them aside from visuals. At least I hope not, because I wouldn’t want to play this twice. I guess I did. This is the third time through it, by my count. Don’t grow up to be like me, children.

You run around barren levels with terrible weapons, fighting the same three dudes. Occasionally, there’s an alien or an insect to really shake things up. One level has you drive a tank, and another a boat, and they’re both pretty lame. Somewhere, a design document probably says “Vehicles!” and this was as far as that got.

NICE TRY, VIKKI

The story is drawn from the same well as many of the Army Men games. The Tan have super weapons. The Green Army only has one, which is Sarge (and Vikki, I guess). Now, they fight.

It’s so bland. The whole game. I feel like ending things with that: it’s bland beyond your wildest imaginings. It’s like eating drywall, but with less nutritional content. Combat involves either getting a tan soldier lined up in your eight directions and shooting them before they shoot your or slapping them with your rifle. The latter is actually the better choice, because they flinch when you smack them. You get grenades, but the hit detection sucks. There are alternate weapons, but they’re rather rare and only marginal improvements. Objectives include destroy the thing, reach the thing, and get the thing. Health alternates between being too sparse and too plentiful. Not very much fun.

Its main redeeming feature is the art style, which won’t be to everyone’s tastes. However, it at least has some personality. Mostly. It’s sometimes kind of generic. On the other hand, the levels each have their own visual identities. Some of the levels take place in the “Plastic World” and others in the “Big World” or however they choose to name the series dual realities. So, alongside military forts, there’s also someone’s lawn and a bathtub.

But then there’s this “Evil Mole” who looks ridiculously cute.

It’s at least unique within the series. It’s nice that someone thought to take it in their own direction. But that’s the only praise I have for it.

EVIL MOLE

It’s sort of a shame that the sound design is so terrible. There’s very little music in the game aside from various fanfares. The sound effects are recognizably from stock libraries. Not that using stock sound effects is a bad thing – I recognized the lockpick sound effect from Morrowind in there. They just chose the blandest, most obvious ones, and you get really intimate with them because of how rare the background music is.

But, to be absolutely fair, aside from some of the standout games I named earlier in the article, Army Men Advance is kind of representative of the typical quality of early Game Boy Advance titles. Games like Pinobee or No Rules: Get Phat. They were often just bland get-a-game-on-cartridge experiments that were rushed to fill the handheld’s post-launch honeymoon period. Later on, this would be the benchmark quality of shovelware, which makes sense, because the developer, DC Studios (not related to the comic book imprint) made a lot of licensed stuff. Lower-case “L” licensed, like Winx and Bratz. 

And I thought Winx was about fairies – and Wikipedia tells me it is – but none of the screenshots on MobyGames show fairies. Still, I bet if Winx came out a decade earlier (and assuming it is actually about fairies), I would have been way into it. I wonder if I’d get any value out of it now.

Anyway, that’s the best I can say about Army Men Advance: it reaches the low quality standard of the early GBA library. It also makes me appreciate Army Men: Operation Green more. Especially since it came out the same year. Simultaneously, Army Men Advance isn’t terrible. I’ve played worse Army Men games, certainly. It just doesn’t have anything going for it. For example, it doesn’t have any fairies.

4/10

This review was conducted on a Game Boy Advance Micro using a cartridge version of the game. It was paid for by the author. Screenshots were obtained using the Visual Boy Advance emulator.