In order to understand Armed and Dangerous, you have to understand its animal reserves. �What does he mean by that?� you might ask. Well, it�s just that sort of game. Defined more by its humor than anything else, you can�t grasp a clear picture of Armed and Dangerous without understanding the humor that infiltrates every element of the game, from weapons design to character development, and nothing sums it up better than �animal reserve.� That�s where you start, and let me tell you, it doesn�t pay to be an animal in A&D; it�s like being a pedestrian in Grand Theft Auto III. Whether you�re a cute cuddly pigeon-like thing, or some sort of woolly mammoth enjoying a mid-day nap, you�re equally likely to get a large popsicle stuck up your rear-end during a cut scene � honest to God truth. Like I said before, that�s just the sort of game Armed and Dangerous is. And it�s pretty dang funny.
Built around a sense of boyish humor, Armed and Dangerous is mostly flair backed with relatively entertaining, if repetitive, gameplay. It�s fast paced, high intensity, and has more in common with a complex side scroller, where enemies are endlessly generated as long as you remain in one area, than it does a tactical shooter. With competent controls, entertaining weapons, and a whole lot of bullets, Armed and Dangerous is for those of us with twelve-year-old inner children who laugh uncontrollably at movies like Naked Gun 2 1/2.
The story opens when our heroes, a human (you), a Scottish mole-like fellow, and a very big British robot with an affinity for tea, decide to steal a magic book from an evil king. When it boils down to it, A&D is a clean-cut good guy versus bad guy story, with clear-cut heroes, and equally clear-cut villains. This straightforward approach never becomes confusing, and carries over well into the actual gameplay. If it moves, and isn�t you, shoot it. In that way, at least, even Hogan�s Alley had more ambiguity. In the same vein, many of the levels are linear, starting you at point A, and ending when you reach point B. To top this off, many levels have endlessly generated enemies produced from squat, hut-like structures, throwing themselves out the door and into the battle as long as the building still stands. Blow it up, and the enemies stop coming. This leads to a very intense level of action � hundreds of bad guys, thousands of bullets � but certainly kills the calculated, tactical aspects of stalking your prey. Not that it�s a bad thing; it�s just flavored with a bit more hack and slash � kill them as they come � than many other first person shooters, which focus on mood development and other such non-essential things. At its heart, Armed and Dangerous is a guns blazing, endless ammo combat game, starting with combat and finishing with well, a cut scene, technically. But leading up to it is a lot of combat, trust me.
All of this is helped immensely by the game�s striking sense of style. Though it probably won�t be picking up any fashion awards this year, A&D combines a resonant, Scottish blend of music with a Monty Python style of humor (they even make fun of the French). All sorts of nonsensical things are happening. What develops is an identity all its own, one which shows up right at the start in the first cut-scene, and continues all the way until the end. Half the fun is killing bad guys by the hundreds; the other half is getting to the end of the level so you can see that next cut scene.
While the levels are almost entirely linear, and the computer controlled enemies numerous, A&D does an amazing job of keeping things interesting. Even though you�re traveling in a straight line, there are often interesting enough goals, and challenging enough obstacles, to keep you attached to progress. More so, enemy soldiers can be surprisingly intelligent, climbing walls and buildings to acquire a better shooting angle, and diving into turrets when the fighting breaks out. With so many bullets flying, you�ll rarely find yourself stuck in one place for long, and every time you start to feel the weight of repetitive play begin to press down on your shoulders, the game throws out a curve; a turret level, or a jetpack, for example. In this way, new weapons are dallied out like candy to the sweet deprived; they don�t cost anything, and most levels holds some sort of new treat.
The turret levels put you in the position of gunner on a wall-mounted turret, defending a city against an invading army. At first there�s the, �Oh, crap,� factor, as you watch the seemingly endless hordes of enemies line up in the distance for the charge. What follows is the, �Oh yeah,� factor, which is what comes to the lips when you realize that there are a near endless number of troops that are about to charge helplessly at your fortified machine gun nest. Add in that constantly heroic Scottish soundtrack, and it all adds up into a one-of-a-kind experience. Games with this mix of humor, action, and production value are far and few between.
The weapons you pack around with you are worth mentioning. Take the Land Shark Gun, for example. See a lot of guys? Send in a dry-land sea predator to pop up from underneath and devour them, just like the Jaws amusement ride, only with real teeth. Or the Topsy-Turvy bomb, which turns the world upside down while you hang for dear life to a corkscrew in the ground, dropping everybody into the air. When it rights itself, bodies rain from the sky like leaves in the autumn, leaving behind piles of ammunition instead of something that needs to be raked up, thankfully.
For all of its style and its clever intentions, though, Armed and Dangerous has some issues. These tend to deal primarily with the limits in its gameplay. For example, it�s great to watch enemies swing from rooftops, climb into windows, and snipe at you from the second story, but try it yourself? Not a chance. Short of blowing the building up, there�s no way to go inside them, with the exception of the Pubs, where you pickup additional weapons. After taking out a sniper, what you really want to do is climb his tower and see what can be seen. Can you do it? Of course not. There are some things that you simply don�t ask a hero to do; apparently, climbing rungs on a ladder is one of them.
Also, while you have two sidekicks that run around with you, shooting what you shoot, eating what you eat, they�re basically worthless. While the enemy soldiers swing into nifty shooting locations, your teammates basically wander the playing field until they�re shot and killed. In terms of doling out damage, it�s my personal opinion that more people get hurt during the game from stray bullets than they do from the aimed ones fired by your colleagues. Statistically, by random chance they should kill more than they do. Still, most of the time they die off rather quickly (not that you notice), and so it becomes a mute point. At first I felt bad when they died, as if I had failed, and would reload. After a while, though, I realized it was just their way of life, sort of the way that the cheap goldfish from the carnival only live about a week before dying of old age. You could mourn them, true, but there isn�t much to do that will help keep them alive; it�s just the natural way of things. Plus, they always come back around for the next cut scene, and all is well.
When it comes down to it, Armed and Dangerous doesn�t feel like a game that ever aimed for the 5-star category, in the same way that Liar Liar never set out for an academy award. It doesn�t sit well at the table of serious games, pales beside the industry changers; it�s really more at home at the twelve to fourteen table, making various funny noises that wouldn�t pass at the table with the stuck-ups. It gets you laughing, though, and when added together, gives you a solid four-star bit of fun. You don�t always have to enjoy the humor, you�ll still have a blast killing things, but really, when it boils down to it, the humor is why Armed and Dangerous exists. If you�re not there for that, you�re not playing for the right reasons.