In the center of the story is a hero named Roman. He leads the Lionheart band of robbers, who are at war with the evil king. He has loyal companions: the sapper mole Jonesy, the Q battle droid and the powerful mage Rexus.. The gameplay is an action game in which you have to fight the army of King Forge and blast waves of enemies with a turret. Each hero owns a specific weapon. Roman deftly controls all the guns, Jonesy uses a revolver and dynamite.
Rexus loves shotguns, and the droid is equipped with a 6-barreled Minigun. What the game's really about is sitting back and enjoying the silly cutscenes with hilarious send-ups of Star Wars, among others and then blowing the crap out of anything that moves or sits still during the missions.
This game doesn't aim for sophistication; it aims for headshots. You control a master thief named Roman from a third-person perspective. His buddies Jonesy, a short-tempered moleman, and Q, a highbrow robot, tag along, helping you fight. Rexus, a diminutive and perpetually stinky seer with googly glass eyes, also tags along, riding inside Q's chest cavity and sipping tea from a convenient dispenser onboard.
Rexus rides along for comic relief, so all you really need to concentrate on is Roman, Q, and Jonesy. The latter two are controlled by the AI and basically just follow your moves, helping you blast bad guys. Like Roman, Jonesy and Q each has his own health bar, so you'll need to keep on eye on their status during fights. Hordes of orc-like troops and masked commandos with German accents descend on you in droves from every direction, firing from windows, running out of convenient barracks spawn points, and jetpacking after you.
All you have to do is blast these goons back into the Stone Age. On paper, this may or may not sound exciting depending on what you're looking for, but in practice it's decent fun, at least until the cookie-cutter missions start to drag you down with their repetitiveness. You get tons of ammo and lots of wild weapons you pick up at village pubs. Then there are all your secondary weapons, like sticky bombs, which let you watch enemies run around in horror before they explode; the Topsy Turvy bomb, which turns the world upside down and sends bad guys flying; and the World's Smallest Black Hole, which sucks enemies into oblivion.
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 bogstandard 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 submachine guns and sometimes rocket launchers or jet-packs , battle droids, teleporting priests, gun emplacements and the occasional species of aggressive wildlife.
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 Al. 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.
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 settinc 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. 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. I remain unconvinced. A game's J first priority is to entertain in an interactive manner. If there's humour, we want to be a part of it. 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. Hilarious, no. When Q1 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.
Ah, Summer. Those halcyon days when fields and meadows beckon, and the sweet perfume of future memories are borne on gentle zephyrs. A time for blockbuster movies to transport their wide-eyed audience into another world of action and intrigue. Led by criminal mastermind Roman, the diverse roster features such unsavoury types as a seer-cum-madman, a Scottish demolitions expert, and just to round things off, a robot who's attained inner peace through a studied love of tea.
No, we haven't confused the fact sheet with that of a posthumous Douglas Adams novel or the new Futurama DVD release - this is spot on the level. Just to prove it, there's not an ounce of interstellar shipping involved. The motley crew, known as the Lionhearts, has lined up a serious score: pulling the biggest heist ever, and right in the gullet of a war to boot.
Fortunately, they're armed with enough firepower to blow the cooling unit off your new GeForce Ultra. Oh, and there's a bit about rebellion and a tyrant king in there, too.
Now it's beginning to sound more like Martin Bashir's turned his cameras on the Hussein family. But never mind that - think of the glory! Why, the redemption value on all those spent shells alone could finance an army. Rumour has it that Roman is an EastEnder, and in the hands of anyone but LucasArts that might be cause for fear. But knowing what those capable hands did with the accents in Grim Fandango , here's hoping that this antihero won't emerge sounding like Johnny Depp in From Hell.
Even better, the development chores are being handled by Planet Moon Studios, who, in the early days of GeForce powered enlightenment, produced the entertaining and slightly twisted Giants: Citizen Kabuto. While the publisher is certainly putting the emphasis on armament, anyone who played Giants should remember the skewed humour behind the game just as well as its insane weaponry and multi-faceted characters, and that's what's really got us salivating about this one.
Concept art reveals a world lying somewhere between that of Lucas and anime legend Miyazaki, with retro-styled robotic drones and majestic airships decorated with vanes and spires. Five types of environment will be in the final game, including lush forests, rain slicked mountains and snowy expanses.
And then there are the guns. Lots of guns. One has a forebarrel like the gaping maw of a shark, another, the Vindaloo Rocket Launcher, fires four projectiles guaranteed to make recipients feel incredibly uncomfortable. Regardless, all can be relied upon to deal out massive amounts of carnage. Of great interest is the Topsy-Turvy Bomb, which actually turns targeted areas upside down, reverting back to normal in time for affected enemies to experience a sickening fall.
Turreted vehicles will also play into the lunacy, with an interface that will immediately be familiar to Giants veterans. The level designs, weapons and design sensibilities all bear the stamp of the highly creative Planet Moon team. The oddball characters all promise to be memorable too, as attention to detail is here in spades, with high-poly models seemingly designed to make you care But first, please, take the time to look into the eyes of the Dr Moreau-reject Grunts, insane droids and, erm, Twiglets.
Marvel at the unparalleled array of missions! Well, there are Cower before the limitless arsenal! OK, 17 weapons really, but who's counting? While all those Star Wars games keep the lightsaber-builders happy, it's been a long wait for those of us who were enamoured with the company's less glamorous, yet more satisfying titles.
While there's no shortage of average, undergraduate humour in games today, really well-crafted undergraduate jokes are to be treasured, and this combination of talent looks like a shimmering well of unsavoury entertainment. Great action and great jokes? We can't wait. Hell, I like blowing up as much as the next guy, but these days, mindless gunplay gets you only so far.
Sure, Armed and Dangerous has some inventive weapons, but it's still a pretty basic third-person shooter--and one with dated graphics and a dopey sense of humor, at that.
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