13-Aug-2001 The last time Patrick McCarthy tried Armoured Fist he acquired Rusty Bowel Syndrome. It was so entertaining we gave him the sequel.
I'm getting really tired of shouty, overbearing sergeant major types you get in any military game which has tutorial missions in it. All that garbage they spout: 'Alright ladies, I'm your goddam instructor. You will do this. You will do that. The only way you're leaving mah trainin' course is in a body bag - and if you don't, I'm gonna push my penis into yur ear and make you sing songs from West Side Story...' Or whatever. Sadly, everyone does it now. The thing is, they not only don't work, they have exactly the opposite effect to that which is intended. As soon as someone starts shouting at me, I just drive about in my tank and start shelling all my comrades and blowing up all their buildings. Of course, that makes them start yelling at you even more. But they don't do anything, do they? Pussies.
All change. (Not.)
Of course, we all know how to play the game anyway, so we don't need these tutorials. The reason we know how to play it is that we played the first one, and liked it a lot. We like tank games anyway - sneaking about in a gulley, popping up to blow the life out of an ice-cream van, then sneaking back into the gulley again - it's all very appealing, in the same way a sub game is. (Only faster, obviously. And not in water.) And this has everything you could wish for in a tank game - you can control anything from one tank to lots of tanks, jump about between tanks and between different 'jobs' in the same tank, plot waypoints, plan missions, and so on. But then, you could in the last version.
Again, like the last one, there are one-off blasts of various descriptions, accompanied by four campaigns with interlinked missions - including the dubious sounding Operation Provide Relief, which I thought was what ladies in nylon undergarments did for tired businessmen.
What's new?
So anyway, you start to wonder what's new. Well, there's the multiplayer option, which no self-respecting game should be without these days, and there's the improved graphics. Except that the graphics aren't that improved. Don't get me wrong, they're better than the previous game, which had a giant-carpet-tile effect whenever you got close to something. But considering every other game we've seen lately has built-in 3D-hardware support, the lack of anything of the sort makes this look a bit crap by comparison. You only have to compare it to something like Screamer Rally. On my old P90, Rally's hugely-detailed graphics still run like excrement off a garden digging implement, thanks to 3Dfx. This, on the other hand, jerks more than a teenage boy with a Russ Meyer video and the house to himself. So the graphics are better, but hardly stunning by today's standards and you'll need a much better machine to play what is essentially the same game. Which means therefore, it gets a lower score.
// Overview
Verdict
Nice enough, but much the same as the previous one.
