Armed and Dangerous review

Roman, the leader of the Lionhearts.

Armed and Dangerous is a comical adventure game in which you lead a gang of outlaws on a mission to save the people from the evil king. Humour is very widely used in Armed and Dangerous to carry the story and the action from comic cut scenes to outrageous weapons and action. Taking on the role of Roman, the leader of the Lionhearts, the gamer must fight their way through over twenty levels in a mixture of third and first person perspectives.

Outrageous

Get out of the way of the archers.

Armed and Dangerous tries to make as much of its humour as possible. This is obvious through the cut scenes as well as in the games action. The in-game humour is provided primarily by the weaponry which ranges from a machine gun to a land shark gun and a traitor grenade. The machine gun is the stock weapon with plenty of ammo lying around. This is a rapid fire weapon with great accuracy which is helped by the auto aim. This makes the rest of the weapons pretty worthless really as most of the time you’ll only need this weapon to complete the missions. The heavy weapons become useful against larger enemies and the bombs are good for clusters of enemies as you might expect.

The other weapons are only likely to be used for novelty purposes from time to time. The Land Shark Gun, for instance, fires out a shark which you see as a fin running through the ground before it pops up and eats your enemies. Other novelty weapons are included like the Vindaloo Rocket Launcher but ultimately these weapons are not of much value in the game. The bombs are similarly limited to the useful and abundant sticky bomb with novelty bombs like the Topsy Turvy Bomb, Traitor bomb and World’s Smallest Black Hole. These bombs have their uses but ultimately you’ll find that the balance in weapons is so heavily weighted towards the basic abundant ones that you just don’t need the novelty ones.

Armed

The Shark gun is funny the first time but gets old quick.

You might think that with such powerful, abundant weaponry Armed and Dangerous would be a pushover. This isn’t the case. The levels have such abundant enemies that you need to consider your tactics for each part of each level. The enemies aren’t at all intelligent and appear to have no group sense when attacking but just all shoot at you with no real pattern. This means that your tactics have to revolve around going in guns blazing and making the best use of cover to avoid getting caught in crossfires.

Whilst you are assisted in your mission by the rest of the Lionhearts – a blind seer, a mole and a robot – they aren’t actually much use either. They can take a lot of enemy fire but seem endowed with the same lack of intelligence as the enemies making them useless tactically. You can, of course, issue them commands but these are limited to defend me and defend over there. The missions aren’t terribly varied in looks or in terms of enemies. You have some variety in the objectives though, such as destroying particular enemy installations or rescuing civilians. The other type of mission is a defend situation where you switch to first person mode and man a rail gun to defend a castle from huge numbers of enemies. The levels present little difficulty or challenge in achieving the objectives other than throwing huge numbers of enemies at you.

Mockney

The framerate holds up well even in the heat of battle.

The missions are set up using movie style cut scenes. These are pre-rendered, not using the in-game engine, and played back from very compressed files. This results in them being of truly horrible quality, pixilated and rough around the edges. The voice acting is also pretty terrible with a rubbish mockney accent a poor Welsh and some other non-descript British accents – one may have been Scottish but its hard to tell (He’s Scottish and I really liked the voice acting – ed.).

The story uses humour to try and keep the story going. There are a few genuinely funny parodies and some not very funny parodies. The bulk of the humour in this game is childish and obvious. The humour tries to lie in the same area as the Monkey Island games, and being published by LucasArts you can see where some of the inspiration may have come from. It fails at achieving the comedic levels seen in other LucasArts titles like Sam & Max and Monkey Island. Ultimately, the cut scenes don’t serve their purpose. The story doesn’t really flow through them and they don’t even seem to lead into the mission that they’re trying to introduce.

In Control

The first person missions break up the game a bit but are too easy.

Probably the best part of Armed and Dangerous is the control system. It’s not quite perfect but it makes a pretty good stab. The default layout gives you movement under the left thumbstick and aiming in the right. The left thumbstick is clicked to jump whilst clicking the right gives a secondary fire. The right trigger gives you main fire.

There are also buttons for reload, orders and special weapons but these are the main ones you’ll need and they’re very intuitively laid out. The only downside is that changing weapons is done with the D-pad. Not a big problem as you won’t be changing weapons very often, but when you do need to it’s usually in the heat of battle and means taking your thumb off the movement control while you try to find the appropriate weapon leaving you as a sitting duck.

Dangerous

There are no close range weapons so use the machinegun wherever the enemy is.

The graphics in Armed and Dangerous are passable. They aren’t great and they aren’t terrible. There’s no major problem with them – the character models are fairly detailed and well animated and the frame rate is generally pretty solid. The scenery is also fairly well detailed with plenty of interaction destroying buildings and trees. The levels aren’t terribly varied, however, and the level design tends to be pretty open, meaning that there is no subtlety to the action it’s guns a blazin’.

The sound improves matters slightly, if we ignore the voice acting – which is quite hard. The positional audio works really well and the sound effects deliver a realistic experience on the conventional weapons. The effect track helps to make the unconventional weapons work too by providing a believable audio experience to an unbelievable game.

What’s Subtlety?

Most of the missions are just blasting your way through but there are some search and rescue missions.

Armed and Dangerous is an old fashioned arcade action game. It lacks subtlety in any aspect. The weapons are outrageous, the humour is outrageous and the action is outrageous. For all the promise this might have it feels like its trying to cover up. Throwing loads of enemies into missions helps to cover up the fact that there’s very little to do and there’s little thought been put in to the design of the levels. The humour in the cut scenes tries to appeal to an audience in their late teens and especially anyone who finds humour in any joke which contains rude words. This is really just covering the lack of real gags and poor story quality.

The weaponry is there to try and cover up the fact that the weapon balance hasn’t been thought about so you’ll swap your weapons around because you want to see the novelty weapons rather than for any strategic value. Armed and Dangerous is not a deep game by any stretch. It’s a very flawed attempt at a genre which is difficult to balance correctly. It tries to cover up its short comings in a variety of ways all of which are, themselves, flawed in some way.