Armed and Dangerous (2003)

It's definitely odd, but not odd enough to comment too much, it just lands on that weird sweet spot of early 2000 game that is low budget and isn't going out to accomplish that much besides be another arcade shooter so I guess I can't write too much about it, think of that one late PS1 game that is just a isometric shooter done by a very small developer team and is often not talked about at all. It being "the most third person shooter third person shooter there is" could be enough motivation for anyone who somehow played every single third person shooter and is looking for more.

I'd call it awfully generic and inoffensive, but it's art department and it's quirkiness would like to say otherwise, the cutscenes feel like softer more British takes of Xavier: Renegade Angel, I often forget that good voice acting was hard to find around this time so it deserves a compliment as well, yes it is an arcadey third person shooter but some weapons are wacky, like a gun that shoots a shark, a bomb that flips the entire map upside down, and much more. I understand how that If you grew up with this game, chances are it is a classic, but if you were to play it today, it's just really ok at best. Think Monty Python, and how we only remember the good sketches, but how there were a lot of hit or miss sketches too that nobody talks of.

It suffers from early 2000 map design in which it wants to show how big it's map is (like Halo) but the movement speed of the characters often does not go well with how much you have to traverse, later on you get a jetpack that glides with wings that is kinda fun for a bit but doesn't entirely fix this issue. This game being out around 2003 and also available on XBOX, still having a smooth frame rate definitely makes it feel more special, this is gonna sound like a weird compliment but if a game has an optimization that ranges from "I cannot tell if this is a 2000 windows 98 game or a 2014 unity game" that means it's well optimized enough to not age in the technical department, what this game excels in is it's simplicity, it doesn't try to do much besides run good and have basic third person shooting gameplay.

Technical specialties include physics, destructible environments, un-technical specialties include: gameplay being a bit repetitive, sometimes they take away weapons from you which is a bit lame because honestly sometimes you can only progress and do damage to structures and enemies with explosive type weapons that you need to find first every stage. Oh and all items, items you need to progress, often are dictated by random drops that you can't seem to predict.

Weirdly enough this is one of the few oldschool games that makes you wish it did have regenerative health, a controversial design idea, the reason I feel it would be needed is because the bigger the maps become, the more spacious it becomes to find health, health is randomly dropped, there is no logic to when health is dropped, sometimes they give you a lot of it when your health is full and then when you really need it, you can't seem to find an enemy, and when you do, it rarely drops health.

Even though many people do love this game for it's simplicity, I don't see or seek much from it in the end, it has some flaws, it's a very turn off your brain kind of game and the low budget taking the piss cutscenes best exemplify that, this isn't the game that cares that much (even if some map design does shine a lot of effort), so really as far as I can see it, this game could have been one of those games you rented for your xbox when it came out, maybe you'd vaguely remember it being the silliest game you've played and that's how it would stick with you. I could also see this as a shared memory, whenever you get bored about the generic mission you've been playing for too long you just pass the controller to your friend.