Army Men: Toys in Space

I put time into the Army Men series back when 3DO was cranking these out faster than fresh coat of spray paint, and Toys in Space sits in a complicated spot even by that franchise's uneven standards. Released in 1999 and re-issued on Steam in 2017, this is a top-down real-time tactics game where you command Sarge and a squad of Green Army soldiers across household environments - backyards, bathrooms, living rooms, and eventually an alien home world - against a combined Tan-and-alien-invader force. The premise is campy on purpose, and that campy energy is genuinely the game's strongest asset. On the systems side, Toys in Space made real strides compared to its predecessors. Squad members beyond Sarge can now be individually selected and directed via keyboard, which was a genuine step up from Army Men II where only Sarge responded to keys and everyone else needed mouse-clicking to move. Power-up variety expanded too: Adrenaline boosts, Forcefield invincibility windows, and flak jackets for squad members, plus helicopter call-ins and Spacemen reinforcement drops for Sarge himself. The weapon roster is legitimately entertaining - silenced rifles, napalm, freeze rays, laser guns, incendiary grenades, glue guns, and fly-swatters all make appearances. Enemy variety gets a genuine shot in the arm from the alien factions: Stunners, Paralyzers, Gunners, Incinerators from the Galactic Army, and Larvae, Spiders, Drones, and Commanders from the alien side. For once in this series, there is even a proper boss encounter. Here is where the numbers stop looking good, though. The squad AI is genuinely unreliable. Splitting units into sub-groups, issuing coordinated movement, and keeping fragile VIP characters like Tina Tomorrow alive during escort missions creates friction that no amount of fondness can fully smooth over. The PC controls have never been comfortable in this series, and this entry does not fix that structural problem. Switching between six weapon slots mid-combat under fire feels clumsy, and the enemy AI has pockets of absurdly precise aim with certain power-ups that feel less like difficulty design and more like a bug left in from a compressed dev cycle. Contemporary reviewers cited a rushed production timeline as the likely culprit, and it reads that way in play. Who should actually consider buying this? Primarily people who have already finished Army Men II and want to see how the original trilogy closed out. The alien faction content, expanded environments from sandbox to space-planet city, and the sheer weapon comedy give it a distinct identity within the series. Strategy newcomers looking for a tight RTS experience should skip this entirely - there are far better entry points into the genre. Nostalgia buyers and late-90s PC gaming historians will find enough here to justify the sub-five-dollar price tier it sits in, provided they accept the mouse polling rate community fix and approach the escort missions with patience rather than optimal play in mind. Diego, Scout Team

Playable on Linux with some workarounds. Based on 3 ProtonDB community reports.

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