Army Men II

My honest reaction after booting Army Men II for the first time in years was surprise: this is genuinely more playable than the original, and that matters when you are deciding whether a 1999 real-time tactics game is worth your time in 2025. The core loop puts you in the boots of Sarge, commanding small Green squads against the Tan army across both a miniature plastic world and a full-scale human environment, where kitchen countertops and electric stovetops become legitimately threatening terrain. That dual-world portal concept is the game's best idea, and it still lands. Watching your rifle-wielding, inch-tall soldiers dodge cockroaches on a kitchen counter before portal-hopping back to a plastic jungle has a comedic absurdism that no amount of dated visuals can kill. From a tactics standpoint, do not come in expecting StarCraft-level decision trees. This is action with a thin strategy coating: you control Sarge directly, carry up to six weapons from a pool that includes flamethrowers, mortars, bazookas, magnifying glasses, and aerosol cans, and you call in paratroopers and air strikes when things get hairy. The campaign runs across 12 levels with multiple missions per level, and a Boot Camp mode lets you trial weapons and mechanics before committing to the campaign proper. Three difficulty settings mean newcomers can actually survive the early missions, which is a meaningful improvement over the first game's near-punishing opener. Sarge can absorb significantly more punishment now, and mid-mission manual saves remove the worst of the original's trial-and-error friction. Here is where a strategy brain will start grinding gears. The AI is bad in the specific way that 1999 AI tends to be bad: squad pathfinding collapses under mild pressure, requiring you to babysit units across the map with short click-ahead destination points because they simply cannot self-route around obstacles. On timed missions this is actively painful. The multiplayer component offers six modes including Death Match, Capture the Flag, King of the Hill, and Hold the Black Flag for up to four players, but the real-world maps that make the single-player memorable are locked out of multiplayer entirely, which is a baffling decision that reviewers were calling out at launch and that has never been fixed. Mission structure also leans repetitive late in the campaign, with too many objectives reducible to "destroy the generators" or "eliminate this squad." Who is this actually for right now? Squarely the late-90s PC gaming nostalgia crowd who remember the franchise from childhood and want to revisit a weird, darkly funny corner of that era. The humor skews darker than the premise suggests: game-over screens involve lethal injection and shallow graves, and enemy variants include plastic zombies from a mold factory and suicide bombers with M80s taped to their backs. There is genuine character here that the genre rarely bothered with at the time. For any player arriving cold expecting modern real-time tactics mechanics, the depth simply is not there to justify the learning curve of working around the pathfinding and the dated controls. Steam reception sits at a mixed 67 percent, which is probably the right number.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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