Army Men: Sarge's Heroes is a 1999 third-person shooter video game and the fourth entry in The 3DO Company's Army Men series, which are based on the green plastic figures of the same name. Its Nintendo 64 and PlayStation versions were developed and published by The 3DO Company. The port for the Dreamcast was developed by Saffire and published by Midway, while another for Microsoft Windows was published by GT Interactive.
The primary single-player mode depicts the Green Army, led by Colonel Grimm, fighting against General Plastro's Tan Army, which have found portals to Our World (the human world) that contain useful weapons when fighting in Their World (the world where the plastic soldiers reside). In 3D battlefields of both worlds, the player acts as plastic soldiers of the Green Army completing a variety of missions. In the game's multi-player modes, tan, gray or blue soldiers are options for playable characters. The game features variations of 13 weapons.
Part of a series that covered multiple genres, Army Men: Sarge's Heroes was set by The 3DO Company's founder Trip Hawkins and creative director Michael Mendheim to be a character-focused action-adventure game a la Super Mario (1985–present). Mendheim focused on characters and personalities so that transmedia content could be produced out of them, although none was ever made. He wanted to emphasize the "toy aspect" lacking in the series' previous entries but seen in the army men of Toy Story (1995), which he felt could be the "magic" of the franchise. The game stars Jim Cummings as all the male characters and Susan Blu as Vikki.
Reception from the specialist gaming press were ambivalent, the general notion being that Army Men: Sarge's Heroes was a fun and humorous action game marred by several graphical and technical problems, such as with the controls, camera, draw distance and overuse of fog. As of 2022, 1.3 million units of the Nintendo 64 and PlayStation games combined were sold. The characters would star in several of the later Army Men games by The 3DO Company. Army Men: Sarge's Heroes itself garnered two sequels, Army Men: Sarge's Heroes 2 (2000) and Army Men: Sarge's War (2004).
Gameplay
Synopsis Army Men: Sarge's Heroes is a third-person shooter where players take the role of soldiers in 3D battlefields. It has the feel, pace, weapons and level design of classic arcade shooters like Ikari Warriors (1986) and Guerrilla War (1987), and also features elements of GoldenEye (1997), Command & Conquer (1995), and platform video games. In Their World (the setting for the plastic soldiers) The Green Army, led by Colonel Grimm, has members of the Bravo Company, its best troops, and Grimm's daughter Vikki, a top reporter for the official Green Army newspaper Green Star News, captured by the Tan Army, led by General Plastro. The Tan Army have discovered portals to Our World (the human world), which lie weapons such as magnifying glasses that can melt soldiers. On the Green Army's base, the game's first mission is the leader of the Bravo Company that did not get captured, Sargent Hawk, getting Grimm, his mentor, to an escape chopper. This is all the while the invading Tan Army and other Green Army soldiers attack each other, where Sarge also helps his fellow men. Army Men: Sarge's Heroes features split screen multi-player modes for two players on the PlayStation, and up to four players on the Nintendo 64 and Dreamcast, consisting of deathmatch, capture the flag, and matches where players invade each other's bases. In a Family Mode borrowed from 3DO's BattleTanx (1998), players can individually choose the difficulty level of the choice of weapons, i.e. ones that are quicker to adapt to. Missions The Nintendo 64 and PlayStation versions have 14 missions with up to five objectives each, the Dreamcast 16 missions with three-to-four objectives each, totaling to 40. Tasks vary from finding and rescuing the Bravo Company and Vikki, and disabling a "bug zapper" gate, to capturing blue spies, killing Tan Army soldiers and destroying the portals. The camera defaults to a steady and slightly over-the-shoulder third-person perspective of the player character. Other options are to view the character from the front or first-person, activated with the press of a button. The 3D spaces can theoretically be traversed at the player's own free will, but the missions can be completed by following a path with no requirement for backtracking.
The mission locations bounce between Their World (the plastic world) and Our World (known by Plastro as the Alternate World, the human world). In Their World, the soldiers are scaled human-size in proportion to the setting, and fight on army bases, forests, towns, mountains, and snowy wastelands. In Our World, the plastic soldiers are tiny in proportion to the space and battle in areas of a typical American suburban household, such as the countertop of a kitchen, sandbox, backyard, living room, bedroom, garden, and bathroom. In Their World, foes are the Tan army's soldiers (which dies in one or two hits), tanks and helicopters, while in Our World, enemies include a big spider. Characters and weapons Nine characters are playable in single and multi-player modes. With control that heavily uses context-sensitive buttons like a previously released Nintendo 64 game, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (1998), the player can jump, climb, latch onto ledges, drop and roll, crawl, crouch, strafe, and sneak up to enemies and attack them typical in stealth games. In addition to Hawk, Grimm, Vikki, and Plastro, the game stars five Bravo Company soldiers, modeled after specific poses. The Riff is a Bazooka Man with "the musical chops and coolness of a Blues musician". Hoover is a very skinny, geeky Mine Sweeper hired for his fluid movements and intense focus. Shrap, a Morter Man with a surfer dude personality; Thick, the M-60 Machine Gunner with a strong aim but low intelligence; and Scorch, a Flamethrower so mentally-unstable he loves being near fire. In single player, Sarge and whoever is rescued are the only playable characters; in a mission, a rescued soldier assists for the remainder of a mission, which ends prematurely if they die. In multiplayer modes, players can act as a tan, blue or grey fighter as well as a green one.
Army Men: Sarge's Heroes features variations on 13 weapons that equip the player, most of which require the rescue of commandos that each have a unique set of weapons: an M16 rifle, M60, sniper rifle with a scope for zooming, shotgun, grenade, grenade launcher, C-4, flamethrower, artillery launcher, bazooka, mortar, satchel charge, and mine detector. Collected extra weapons are removed from the inventory by the entrance of the next world. Via simple objectives, the Boot Camp mode, which takes place on a practice range, teaches the player how to platform, use the weapons and push down the levers.
Some tasks can be only be achieved with certain equipment; soldiers on mountaintops can only be killed with snipers, and those in bunkers with grenades. Additionally, some lands are filled with hidden mines solely detectable with the minesweeper. Other scenarios allow multiple choices of weapons to take out opponents. For example, when destroying a tank, it is longer but safer to lay mines around it and then activate them with a grenade throw, than directly destroy it with a bazooka, where missing the shooting could gain the riders of the tank attention to the player character. All weapons besides the default M16 rifle are out of the soldiers' bag if a life is lost.
Background In the late 1990s, following the failure of the 3DO Interactive Multiplayer console, The 3DO Company transitioned to developing and publishing only software. The move started with the Nintendo 64 multiplayer game Battletanx and the tactical PC game Army Men (based on the green plastic toy soldiers of the same name), both developed by separate teams, released around the same time in 1998, and landing in the top-ten of sales charts. The 3DO Company were influenced by this success to create more Army Men games, with its producers and creative staff conceiving a variety of gameplay styles, such as air combat (Army Men: Air Attack) and war strategy (Army Men: World War).
This spawned a multi-million-dollar franchise. As journalists for Game Informer analyzed, the franchise capitalized on a nostalgic revival of toys adults used to play with, like the Army men as well as Mr. Potato Head and Slinky Dog, caused by a film that featured them, Toy Story (1995). 3DO's founder Trip Hawkins, IGNs Dean Austin and PlayStation Pros Will Johnston attributed the game series' continuing commercial success to the demographic of video game consumers, mostly consisting of men, who had fond memories of playing with the green soldiers.
Before Army Men: Sarge's Heroes, the series had covered multiple genres and platforms with two tactics games, the first game and its sequel Army Men II (1999) which were both released for PC and the Game Boy Color, and a PlayStation third-person shooter, Army Men 3D (1999). Wrote Joe Fielder of GameSpot, Army Men 3D, the series' first console entry, "lacked a great deal of spit and polish but had enough going deep down to make you hope for a sequel, albeit one that was much improved".
Development Conception and design
Army Men: Sarge's Heroes is the second creative director project for Michael Mendheim, who, like Hawkins, transitioned from Electronic Arts (EA) to The 3DO Company; he joined during the company's transition to solely a game developer and publisher, being creative director for Battletanx. Designers of Army Men: Sarge's Heroes were Hawkins, B.J. Cholewinski, James Frankle, Mike King, and Robert Zalot. Justin Bates, Ben Lopez and Jon "Pan" Oakley were only credited as designer on the Nintendo 64 and Dreamcast releases, James Farley only on the PlayStation. Although Mendheim suggested artist Michael Kennedy was "driving the story and cinematics", the game credited Sharon Wong as writing the story.
Hawkins and Mendheim established Sarge's Heroes as the franchise's inaugural character-oriented action-adventure game, taking inspiration from the style of Super Mario (1985–present) and incorporating mission design akin to GoldenEye (1997). Army Men: Sarge's Heroes was first announced by The 3DO Company on March 5, 1999, to be released for the Nintendo 64; it was revealed its genre would deviate from previous Army Men games, being a 3D action game a la the Tomb Raider series (1996–present) or Mission: Impossible (1998) with the sniper mechanics of GoldenEye and MDK (1997). A PlayStation version was announced a month later on April 6, with the clarification that it would not be a sequel to Army Men 3D but another version of the previously announced Nintendo 64 game. Mendheim's reason for the focus on a narrative starring characters with personalities and gameplay mechanics was as a blueprint for potential toys, TV series and comic books that would form a transmedia universe Mendheim desired. This direction was influenced by the Mutant League games he worked on at EA, which included Mutant League Football (1993) and Mutant League Hockey (1994) and spawned a cartoon show of the same name (1994–1996).