YMMV / Army Men

• Adaptation Displacement: The series started on PC (and Game Boy Color) as real-time strategy games, before Army Men 3D hit the PlayStation and set the course for Sarge's Heroes. Since most kids in the 90's angled towards the console installments, many fans don't even realize games like World War were drastically different on PC from their console counterparts as a result, or that the Air Attack games were complimented by Air Tactics.
• Awesome Music: Although the series was mostly hated by every professional reviewer in the world, they all agree that the music rocks.
  • Army Men II's soundtrack was almost entirely made up of well-known classical pieces, and they worked really well.
• Critical Dissonance: Critics claim that most of the games are "It's the Same, Now It Sucks!", while fans often have memorable experience playing the games when talked on. That is, until 3DO's bankruptcy, where starting from Sarge's War, the games became universally despised by critics and fans alike.
• Demonic Spiders: Flamethrower troops. Since the threat of fire goes both ways towards Sarge as they do towards any other troops, they can kill you in a second flat even at full health.
• Enjoy the Story, Skip the Game: The cutscenes in the Sarge's Heroes games are way more entertaining than the gameplay itself, owing to Jim Cummings talking to himself for most of the cutscenes and the gags and early CGI being more than a little reminiscent of early Mainframe Entertainment cartoons of the 1990's.
• Franchise Original Sin: The Army Men series has always had moments of surprisingly dark and creepy moments in it (e.g. the Game Over scenes, the level in Sarge’s Heroes where you fight giant insects, the damage done to various army men (including straight up melting), and the entirety of the World War spin-off), but they were balanced out by a mostly charming and cheesy tone. Sarge’s War, however, stripped the majority of the cheese out for a Darker and Edgier tone, causing long time fans to be turned off because of said new tone.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: The most common complaint about the Army Men games is how little differences there are in gameplay from game to game. Every shooter is in third-person with auto-aim and strafing but no diagonal movement.
• Moral Event Horizon: Lord Malice, the Big Bad of Sarge's War set off a bomb during the peace treaty signing, that would have ended the war, while killing the leaders of both factions, Bravo Company and even Vikki. All just so he could continue the fighting.
• Narm: Sarge's War's complete lack of humor and the over-the-top darkness of its cutscenes can be very difficult for some players to take seriously especially since in the actual gameplay, Sarge will still crack rather bad jokes just like he does in the other games even during the most inappropriate moments. Double points for the third level where after the cutscene where all of his friends die, he goes from having borderline PTSD to making a comment about how "The fat lady is here, and this time she isn't singing!" ruining what would have otherwise been a heartwrenching moment.
• Polished Port: The Nintendo 64 and Sega Dreamcast ports of Sarge's Heroes may not be 100% authentic to the PC and PlayStation versions and lack the CGI cutscenes, but generally look and play better thanks to the reworks the game got. On the flip side with Sarge's Heroes 2, every version between PS1, PS2 and N64 are both similar and drastically different, yet the gist of the game is intact across all three platforms impressively enough.
• Power Up Let Down: The various weapons in Green Rogue would be neat — if they didn't take away your Laser Sight. Without it, good luck even hoping to properly aim at most enemies except for vehicular boss fights. This makes grabbing more of the default rifle to power it up much more useful in the stages themselves.
• Scrappy Mechanic: In Green Rogue on the PS1, the game plays about what you'd expect for a shoot-em-up style game. The PS2 version is an auto-scroller, meaning whether you move or not, the game's going to force you along at all times, which gets really bad when the angled camera makes it easier to hit Tan soldiers up close rather than far away — and more likely to get their item drops scrolled off the bottom of the screen as a result.
• Sequelitis: Oh so very much. After Air Attack 2, the series went downhill fast.
  • Green Rogue is a bare minimum for a scrolling shoot-em-up, with ugly graphics, awkwardly long levels, and a Schizophrenic Difficulty that can kill you on a dime. It's often held as one of the weakest games in the series prior to the utter shift below.
  • Sarge's War was needlessly Darker and Edgier as the "final" tale of Army Men, with the gameplay still sticking to the same auto aim and shoot formula with sparser and smaller levels as the game goes on.
  • Major Malfunction features no returning character, again reusing the same auto aim and shoot gameplay, and even worse Art Shift.
  • Soldiers of Misfortune, the absolute last game bearing the Army Men name, alienated the fanbase by not only having no returning characters, but instead making the protagonist a shrunken little kid made worse by the sudden Art Shift towards a Disneyesque style, making it an In Name Only Army Men game if not for the presence of plastic armies and still being a shooter platformer.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: Sarge's War became too dark and edgy for its own good, abandoning the cheesiness and charm of the earlier games in favor of a War Is Hell tone complete with a Downer Beginning and feelings of Vengeance Feels Empty from Sarge at the end.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: In Sarge’s War, the character of Lord Malice/Major Gooding is built up to be a Tragic Villain and a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds because Sarge left him to die after Gooding and Sarge’s platoon walked into an ambush. One problem: Gooding literally fell into a place (a kitchen sink) where Sarge couldn’t hear or see him, not to mention that Sarge was in the middle of a firefight and distracted to begin with. It doesn’t help that Lord Malice literally betrayed the Tan Nation, who helped him recover, by blowing them up as well just to kill Sarge and keep the war going.
• What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: For a series about little green and tan plastic army men shooting at each other, it could be surprisingly dark at times. The earlier PC games have loads of Nightmare Fuel inducing game over cutscenes, characters in some games can have literal chunks of their chest and head and even their limbs blown out of their bodies, transformed into all sorts of nasty insects, apes and zombies and melted into a puddle only getting away with a measly T rating because the characters are toys. Sapient toys but toys no less. And then of course there's Army Men: Sarge's War...