12-Feb-2004 You and your two companions stand in the surrounds of a peaceful, wood-built village, sited in a peaceful forest grove. Fronds of light filter through swaying foliage and bleating lambs gnaw at bristling grass. Birds settle on boughs, spring voices a-twitter.
But no, what's this coming to spoil this serene scene? A platoon of soldiers, half-man, half-animal, with evil intent in their eyes.
Retreating for cover as bullets zing about you, your finger alights upon your trigger. You press hard, releasing a slug of metal the size of a rugby ball which plops from the barrel into the earth, sinking immediately. A second later, a few yards from the point of impact, the cruel curve of a shark's fin pierces the ground, ploughing directly for your enemies.
Panicking, they redirect their fire towards the subterranean predator. But it's too late. Bursting from beneath the feet of its first target, the earth-surfing Jaws savages the bad guy, shaking his broken body like a baby's rattle. His comrades scream widely, the noise curtailed by a devastatingly well-placed salvo from your Vindaloo rocket launcher. Peace returns, especially to the sheep, now at eternal rest, caught in the conflagration caused by your curry cannon.
Fire Away Armed And Dangerous isn't your average shooter. There isn't a team of US special-forces to lead, or an arsenal of real-life weapons to master and a savage Islamic terrorist plot to foil. Instead, we get characters with comedic accents, weapons that could only be the product of a link-up between Coco the Clown and Heckler & Koch, and a pantomime evil king to overthrow. It's a sort of Shrek with guns, Monty 'Colt' Python, if you like.
Gameplay-wise, A&D is a 3D, third-person shooter - an 'action-actioner' in the words of the creators (Planet Moon Studios, the brains behind the fondly remembered Giants: Citizen Kabuto). And as you may have guessed, the tone of the action goes way beyond tongue in cheek, all the way to out-and-out comedy. This is true from the cut-scenes that punctuate the missions, to the comments and asides of your companions, to the nature of much of the weaponry. The designers beavering away for the fabled LucasArts have obviously been busy fashioning a game that'll have you laughing at your workstations. Or that's what they hope, anyway. Have they succeeded? Partially.
Miners Strike You play as Roman, the hard-bitten cockney leader of the Lionhearts, a gang of mercenaries and thieves. At your side for much of the action are Jonesy, a cynical, sarcastic Scottish mole-man miner (maybe someone should have told the Americans it's the Welsh who're renowned for being miners called Jones) and Q1-11, an upper-class battle droid with a penchant for brewing tea. Also appearing is Rexus, the wise old geezer who's the brains behind the whole operation, though you'll only ever really see him in the cut-scenes.
Things begin with the gang setting out to pull off the biggest heist in the history of the land of Milola - stealing the Book of Rule, the most powerful artefact known to mole-man or beast. Soon after, though, Roman and the rest get dragged into a battle for freedom from the yoke of the evil King Forge. A cockney leader's work is never done, eh?
Full Throttle A&D has got its foot firmly on the 'action' pedal. In essence, what you do is traverse each level beating off football stadium-loads of bad guys, using a host of weapons - both bizarre and conventional.
At your side for much of it are your two buddies, Jonesy and Q1-11. Although, with only two commands available ('stay' and 'follow'), they might as well be heavily armed Labradors than intelligent team-mates. No, apart from absorbing enemy fire and giving a little back themselves, these two are more important for the non-stop trickle of one-liners, put-downs, complaints and other such 'side-splitting' commentary. And we'll speak a little more about this constant stream of quips and japes from the posh droid and the Scottish dwarf cross-breed later.
Armed And Dangerous has been developed as a console and PC game simultaneously, but we recommend playing with a mouse and keyboard. For despite its third-person viewpoint, A&D could just as easily be a first-person shooter, such is the emphasis on non-stop combat. Consequently, the freedom mouse-look gives you is invaluable, as there will be enemies coming at you from all directions, and then some.
The most basic of the 21 missions involve you simply getting from A to B. Navigation is never a problem, with little in the way of exploring to be done. Neither will puzzles bar your way, as the only riddling that needs doing is riddling your many opponents' bodies with bullets.
Though they're extremely multitudinous, the bad guys don't come in that many shapes and sizes, with the bog-standard Grunt (a half-man, half-beast soldier armed with a bow or a rifle) being your chief opponent right to the end of the game. Backing these humble foot soldiers up are their officers (armed with sub-machine guns and sometimes rocket launchers or jet-packs), battle droids, teleporting priests, gun emplacements and the occasional species of aggressive wildlife.
Anal Probe There's no doubt that, with its arcade-like momentum, this is not the kind of game where you should get anal about the enemy AI. Which is a good job, because over and above some primitive reactions such as running to man vacant gun emplacements, or diving away from grenades, the average Grunt in A&D displays the brain power of the side of him which is beast, not man.
Instead, what you tend to be confronted with are human wave tactics. At your disposal to tackle this constant, malignant flow is a truly unique set of weapons (though the Worms games must take some credit for inspiration), designed to create comic carnage. And using them is fun - no doubt about it. Along with the aforementioned Land Shark gun and Vindaloo launcher, we also find the Topsy-Turvy bomb (which sends nearby targets flying into the air before crashing back down again), and the world's smallest black hole which sucks enemies into its vortex.
With its ceaseless gunfire and designed-to-be-spectacular stream of explosions, Armed And Dangerous is a lively looking game. Much of what you see, from barrels to trees to buildings can be destroyed, and no doubt you'll oblige in this task. Okay, so it's never going to win awards for its looks, but the game is nice and smooth (vital for an actioner of this pace), with a solid feel to its environments.
Land And Freedom There are five distinct landscapes to fight over, ranging from icy wastelands, to rocky mountain regions, to smoke-shrouded industrial regions. These go together to create a semi-believable setting for the crazed combat, in a cartooney kind of way.
The designs of the houses, forts, factories and castles are all nice, with a quasi-industrial revolution feel to everything. Certain features catch the eye, such as the dense foliage, the wintry trees and the general draw distance - which in some levels allows for some extreme range sniper combat.
Home Alone Apart from the 'get to the end of the level' missions, there are a handful of other tasks you have to carry out. The most common early on is locating villagers and returning them to their homes (ring any bells, Giants fans)? The emphasis here is no less on non-stop blasting, only with the small, added headache of dragging the local village idiot back to his hovel.
Every so often, gameplay swaps for a level, putting you in the turret of a gun fighting off the massed ranks of the King's armies. With twin machine guns and a rocket launcher, you have to blast hundreds of swarming troops before they can scale your walls. The joy of obliterating huge amounts of Grunts is sure to warm anyone's heart. That said, apart from the surrounding landscape, these levels are exactly the same each time and incredibly easy.
What's more, when you've only got 21 levels in the first place, the fact that five or so are these turret missions means there's not a hell of a lot of game for your buck. There is replay value there, as locating secret tokens can unlock cheat modes and the occasional new level. But in the final reckoning, we're looking at a paltry five or six hours play here - and no multiplayer for afters.
No Laughing Matter At the end of the day, putting humour near the top of the list of your game's selling points is a risky business. It's not as if we all dig through our game collection for a good laugh when The Office and Phoenix Nights have finished. But Armed And Dangerous does just that, hoping that there are enough of us out there looking for an antidote to the uncountable number of po-faced RPGs, stern-looking shooters and earnest simulations. Me? I remain unconvinced. A game's first priority is to entertain in an interactive manner. If there's humour, we want to be a part of it.
But to be honest, the comedy value of the weapons in A&D is all but lost in the fury of the action. The Shark gun is largely useless, the Vindaloo launcher looks like any other rocket launcher, and the real workhorses of the game are the humble and humourless machine gun, sniper rifle and sticky bombs.
Which is not to say the action isn't fun - it just isn't particularly funny. Light-hearted, yes. Hilarious, no. When Q1-11 offers you a cuppa in the heat of battle for the 10th time, or when Jonesy starts singing Scottish songs again, the joke has already worn a bit thin. Regardless, most of your companions' in-game mutterings are drowned out by the rattle of gunfire, and your brow is too furrowed in concentration staying alive to register the ones that aren't.
So take away the humour and what you're left with is a simple, undemanding and fast-paced shooter that veers from the gently amusing to a whole lot of fun. But when the fun cruelly comes to an end after a little over five or six hours, what are you left with? The humour. And since the gags wear thin quicker than the knees on Dennis the Menace's jeans, for laughs, give us Phoenix Nights or The Office any day.
PC Zone Staff
// Overview
Verdict
Good, dumb fun - for a while
Uppers
Non-stop action Weapons unlike any others Quite amusing
Downers
Very short Gags wear thin One dimensional (not literally)
Humour, like sex, is something that videogames have rarely successfully pulled off. There are exceptions, of course: GTA III and Vice City's radio stations are full of damn funny banter, Duke Nukem is legendary and Grim Fandango has a knowing line in highbrow hilarity - but generally, it's fairly poor if we're honest with ourselves. There are hidden moments of mirth in most games, but it's the ones that set out to be funny that often aren't. Here's a list of a few of the games we reckon would get even the dourest of curmudgeon giggling.
Still riding high in our Action/Adventure category of our A-List, Grim Fandango featured some of the finest characterisation
of any game ever, with a fantastic script and hilarious interaction between the characters. To this day, few other games have managed to match its sheer comic brilliance.
OK, so it’s about as mature as Teletubbies, but the humour in Duke 3D was enough to have us pissing ourselves. The potty-mouthed, ultra-sexist hard man was the freshest, funniest thing in gaming all those years back. We say again, when the hell will Duke Nukem Forever be finished?
The horrendous everyday carnage of the game itself was ripe for sick humour (running over grannies and that sort of thing), but the real genius laughs are found in the radio stations. With the kind of scripting usually reserved for award-winning BBC2 TV comedies, this is as funny as games get.
A turn-based strategy game with laughs? Oh yes. Almost every one of the many mercenaries you could hire for your team came complete with comedy accent and some kind of terminal social inadequacy they were liable to display in the heat of battle. We laughed.
// Ready To Rumble?
Forget your Shark guns and curry-flavoured missiles: getting started in A&D means you have to master the more mundane firepower of the rifle, machine gun and sticky bomb...
The rifle is the first gun you get. It’s not so great up close as it’s not fast-firing, but it’s decent at middle distance. Use it to target any barrels you see up ahead with Grunts clustered around.
The sticky bomb is a great way to split up a big group of enemies. Throw them liberally – especially at the start of fire-fights when the Grunts are grouped – as dead enemies often drop them as pick-ups.
Any further away and you need to continually tap the mouse button to fire accurate single rounds and short bursts. Continually strafe left and right while doing this if other bad dudes are firing at you.
The machine gun is a mainstay of the whole game. Hold fire down for longer than a second and your fire becomes wild. Which is no problem if your target is close up – just hold down fire till they drop.
Copyright 2006 - 2009 Future Publishing Limited, Beauford Court, 30 Monmouth Street, Bath, UK BA1 2BW England and Wales company registration number 2008885
Non-stop action
