Created in a covert laboratory by splicing DNA from the Green Army's strongest and most skilled soldiers, the "Omega Soldier" is the Tan Army's worst high-tech threat!

Army Men: Green Rogue incorporates a 3rd person shooter with coin-op shoot'em up style gameplay that will raise the heartbeat of anyone who dares to accept the challenge...

You are the Omega Soldier. Your Mission: To Conquer!

Discussion
The Army Men series was the Guitar Hero of it’s day. That is to say, you could expect 1 every year, and sometimes even more. Sadly, this meant some sacrifices had to be made, most of them in the quality department.

This isn’t to say that all Army Men games are bad, in fact the original and the Air Combat games were well done, if not the latter being heavily inspired by the Soviet Strike series. With Green Rogue however, you can tell too many corners were cut.

Our hero, the Green Rogue, is what happens when you take DNA (Plastic DNA?) from the original Army Men team and mold all of it into one sort of super soldier. While this sounds patriotic, the opening cinematic that illustrates how the process worked is actually downright scary. Sarge and crew are suspended in containment tanks, with cords plugged into their jugulars while the green stuff flows into the molding chamber. They don’t look comfortable, and even the Commander is nervous of the process. For a series that usually has wonderfully cheeky cinematic movies, this caught me off guard and set a weird tone for what to expect. Which it turns out, wasn’t pretty.

First and foremost on the list of ‘What the hell happened,” is the frame rate. The game desperately tries to reach a high level of frames-per-second, but the very nano-second it squeaks into a high-resolution mode, it gets kicked back down to a choppy, rough transition of images. You see, Green Rogue is a rail-shooter, where you’re always forced to move forward with minimal side progression. This method of play was perfected years ago on the Super Nintendo and other systems. Ikari Warriors, Contra, hell even Mario to a degree. Not with Green Rogue though – there are points in the game where you literally feel motion sickness because the imagery is moving in a back-and-forth rowing motion when it shouldn’t be.

All of this confusion is piled on by a terrible control scheme. Even when Analog Mode is engaged, Green Rogue only appears to have 8 directions of shooting. Like the Mega Man games on the NES, a majority of your enemies are located outside those 8 directions, and you must run around like an idiot trying to get them lined up. A Strafe button could have helped, but it’s nowhere to be found. Worse still, is that you will die, a LOT. I had to use an Infinite Life code just to get through the game because you will take cheap shots every few feet. It gets even worse with the 4 bosses of the game. While the first 2 are relatively easy, the last two, ESPECIALLY the last boss, are designed to be the cheapest, crudest, most unfair fights you will ever play. The end boss actually cheats – he has minions bring out extra health packs that can replenish him to almost full status even if he was on the verge of death. Even if you kill the minions, they’ll drop the health pack for him to pick up anyway.

This all goes on while one of the more bizarre soundtracks plays in the background. About half the game is typical Army Men game music, but then the other tracks sound…really out of place. Many seem like they were experimental techno tracks left on Wipeout’s cutting room floor.

What makes the whole situation truly sad is that the game did have the potential for a fun 2-player romp. Instead, technical issues and levels that are just too long drag the game down into a melted pile of green poopy goo. Only for the collectors of all things PSX.
 

• A rather darker tone than other Army Men games. The DNA that is taken from the original crew is done by having them floating in storage tanks with cords strapped to their necks, with all involved looking rather uncomfortable.
   
• Don't skip the opening cinematic or you'll miss the small cameo of a Blue soldier.
   
• There's a rather amusing nod to the source material for in-game Tan Jeep vehicles. When they are destroyed, the driver isn't ejected, or even visually affected by the jeep's destruction. At first I thought this lazy programming, until I remembered that many plastic army toys had the driver as part of the actual mold, from the torso up with no moving parts - that's being pretty accurate to references!
   
• The 4 Main Bosses (1 for every 4 levels) are all based on famous toys.
   
• If you're one for GameShark or other cheat devices, avoid any 'Infinite Health' codes on the webs. I tried two different sets, and both affect the game in weird ways. The common link being the game will crash after 2 levels, as your health somehow gets attached to end level characters.
   
• This was also released on the PlayStation 2.