Small Soldiers

The Good
I looked this game up on a whim and I am SHOCKED to see it scored above 50% by both critics AND moby users. Is this a joke? We did play the same game, right? Look at the review by 'Absolute Playstation' - 83%? What standard were you reviewing against?

I guess I need to say something nice about this game now. I'm sure I can think of something - Um... The instruction manual is okay. It accurately describes the controls and power ups and gives a lame excuse as to why the game's setting is completely and absolutely removed from the movie. See - this is the game from the movie's setting - so it treats the characters as if they are real, life-sized people instead of creepy little robot toys. There's a huge logical problem with this, but I'll talk about that in the 'bad' section.

The controls endeavor to be like 'Tomb Raider' - that's not completely bad, Tomb Raider is a fun game, and this game is like Tomb Raider if there were more enemies. Kind of like Syphon Filter, except not anywhere near as good.

The voice acting is actually okay, for what it is.

The weapons can be interesting and are varied.

Having 'ally' characters do some of the fighting can be slightly amusing.

It has a 2 player mode that you might actually want to play with someone else. If you don't own any of the mediocre Duke Nukem games, that is.

The Bad
Okay, let me dispense with this part first - The logic behind the game is that the Gorgonites and Commandos are not in fact toys, but are 'real', because this is the videogame released in the world of the movie. Except, in the world of the movie, the Commandos were the GOOD GUYS. So this game should have been about murdering the Gorgonites. OOPS.

Secondly - the Commandos all explode and do 'robot' dying animations, as blowing up robots is PG, and murdering people is Teen. OOPS.

Thirdly - The ONLY charm this game could have had was from the movie - which is about innovative toys coming alive and weaponizing household appliances. Toy Story can't give us that - you didn't have toys trying to murder children with those corn-cob end stickers! In this movie you do! What really pisses me off is that even when this game came out it was an explored concept to have tiny player in familiar environment, and people liked it. Not only is it more interesting, it's a lot easier to model a giant kitchen than it is to make a level from scratch. Why? Because you can have a 6 story tall refrigerator (which is essentially a giant ass cube) in the corner of a room in a giant kitchen and call it a set-piece, you can't have a giant rock cube in the corner of a stage and call it the same, it's just a stupid box. Ever play the Army Men series? Wasn't the kitchen level fun? I remember sniping the guys up on the counter fondly. From a design perspective, it was actually a pretty basic one-open-room environment, but the fact that it was a giant kitchen made it FUN. Not that these level designs aren't a complete goddamn joke to begin with - bland, green, brown, way too reliant on 'sacred fires' which are glorified elevators to the next bland, green, brown, series of rooms with nothing in them. Or caves with nothing in them except enemies and turrets. Who built these places? What are they for? When Wolfenstein is making you look bland and stupid, give up. 83%? What?

And the character models - my god. The scaling is bad, similar to the first Twisted Metal game, as things get closer or farther away they just don't scale right. In a game where you are constantly firing things farther away it is extremely distracting. And why are you constantly firing a gun? It doesn't fit with the 'Gorgonite' thing at all, it would have made a lot more sense to actually do it right and have Chip and his goons slaughtering the misshapen freaky Gorgonites - it would have been more like Doom that way.

And the damage it takes to take down ONE GUY - again, if this is supposed to be 'real people' - why does it take like 30-40 shots to drop someone? I understand that they couldn't have a lot of sprites in level at once (given how shitty everything is), but there are ways around that by using fog (which is conspicuously absent (given how shitty everything is). Turok on N64 was a damn good shooter despite being foggier than Dagobah during a forest fire.

The Bottom Line
This is a real stinker that suffers from concept separation - meaning that the fact that it is licensed material but just WRONG makes it worse than if it were some generic original entity. In fact, I have a hard time believing that this wasn't being cobbled together AS a generic original entity (the play mechanics) and then along came a license opportunity for a franchise. So they slapped some new skins on their character models for 'Perfect Weapon 2 - you found a gun' and shoved it out.

It isn't hard to see what this game should have been. This game should have been about the player infiltrating a factory to stop the Commandos from mass manufacturing themselves. It should have incorporated Stealth elements, as Stealth was something the Gorgonites were actually demonstrably good at. It should have started off in a house, and have been about going on a journey to find the factory, gather allies or whatever, and then make a final mission inside to try to take down the plant. It should have embraced the 'robots' theme the way the movie did, and have your enemies get arms and legs ripped off and just keep coming - zombies WERE kinda big that year. Instead, it takes everything it had going for it and just throws it out the window.

I'm serious - I'd like to sit down and watch these people who gave this steamer over 80% play this piece of crap and tell me what's good about it. Them we can play some Goldeneye and get some goddamn perspective!