rmed and Dangerous is a new comedy/first-person shooting game from the people who created Giants: Citizen Kabuto. In practice, it is many funny cutscenes interspaced with lots of chances for the player to blow things up. In the shooting and blowing-up sections of the game, the player controls Roman, the leader of the Lionhearts, a band of mayhem-inclined thieves. Besides Roman, the Lionhearts consist of Q, a tea-drinking robot, and Jonesy, an anthropomorphic mole. Jointed by Rexus, a very blind, very stinky old wise man, the Lionhearts are on a quest to recover the Book of Rule, which has fallen into the hands of the evil despot, King Forge.
There are four types of mission in A&D. Roman has to get from one end of a level to the other, or Roman has to rescue a certain number of peasants from Forge's men, or Roman has to blow up certain houses that Forge's troops have taken over. As the game goes along these missions start combining, until the Roman usually has to do all three to clear a level. Sometimes Jonesy and Q come along to support Roman. Other times he is alone, as in the fourth mission type, which puts Roman in a fixed machine-gun and cannon emplacement. Literally hundreds of Forge's troops attack him in waves, and Roman must keep fewer than 100 from getting past him.
To stop Roman and the Lionhearts, Forge has a variety of soldiers, from bow-and-arrow-armed orcs all the way up to jet-pack-equipped humans carrying rocket launchers. Which is not to mention the giant, chaingun-toting robots. The troops are bolstered by machine-gun, cannon and rocket emplacements. To face these enemies, Roman's primary weapon is a Flemming machine gun, but on most missions he also gets a sniper rifle and a grenade launcher. To improve his killing power he also gets some weird weapons like the topsy-turvie bomb and the landshark gun.
Armed with laughs worthy of Monty Python
The best thing about A&D is its sense of humor, nearly all of which is of that genre of humor best loved by gamers: Monty Python. The cutscenes are full of the funny accents, deadpan delivery, silly costumes, twisted sight gags and sexual innuendo that the Pythons were masters of. Despite this, there is not a single direct steal from a Python sketch in the scenes. Not all the jokes are original in subject matter, but as with the Star Wars satire early in the game, none of them has ever been done in quite this way. Even late in the game, when the luster of killing and blowing things up has started to fade, the player will find the desire to see the next cutscene pulling him through the levels.
The killing and exploding parts of the game are good, but not as stand-out as the cutscenes. The enemy AI is good: If Roman kills one orc manning a machine gun, for example, another will run over and use it. The enemies use cover and snipe from range when possible. Overall, their AI seems to be better than that of Q and Jonesy, who do little more than follow Roman around and shoot at whatever he is shooting at. Still, enormous bonus points have to be given for the inclusion of the landshark gun, possibly the coolest FPS weapon since the OICW in Quake, and definitely the funniest. Players will find themselves holding their fire with their other guns just to leave enemies alive for the landsharks to eat.
The missions in A&D are overall challenging in a good way. The only levels are frustrating because of the game's design are the rescue levels. The compass on the screen points Roman toward the imperiled peasants, but it doesn't point toward the homes where they have to be dropped off. Some of the A&D's levels are quite big and complex; players can spend lots of time just looking for a peasant's house. Still, for players who like to laugh and who like the "run and shoot" first-person genre of game, Armed and Dangerous is a game to buy.
I love that you duck into pubs to restore Roman's health and restock his weapons, but FPS ammunition physics are in full force for Armed and Dangerous. Roman can carry 1,000 rounds of ammunition for his machine gun, but he can carry only seven rounds at a time for his sniper rifle and only two "loads" for the landshark gun, sadly limiting its use.
— Eric
Back to the top.
