Back in the glory days of PC gaming, one company stood head and shoulders over all others for irreverent, quirky humour. That company was Lucasarts, and the games in question were Sam & Max Hit the Road, and Monkey Island. Two games that are held in such high esteem that when it was announced that a new version of Sam and Max was to be canned, the outcry by fans worldwide could be heard on Coruscant. Although no Jedi have heeded the call as yet, fans of offbeat, fun filled games need not be too worried, for it lives on in Armed and Dangerous.

Armed & Dangerous can only be described as fun. A hell of a lot of fun. From the first moment you start playing, you’ll find yourself chuckling at the comically drawn characters, enemies and the cheeky, often rude humour. The characters of the game are the first indication of how much fun this game offers – Roman, a masked fighter; Q, a very English robot who’s always drinking tea; Jonesy, a dour Scottish explosives expert who also happens to be a mole; and a weird smelly old blind man, Rexus, who is central to the plot. Not your ordinary bunch of heroes by any stretch of the imagination. These misfits, called the Lionhearts, find themselves at odds with the king of the land, who wants ultimate power buy unlocking the Book of Rule, which can only be unlocked by the person who locked it… which happens to be Rexus. So a bounty is put on the Lionhearts heads’, and every man and his dog wants a piece of them, so they have to fight their way through 21 levels of absolute mayhem.

The action comes think and fast. There are literally hundreds of opponents to kill on each level, and at your disposal is an incredible arsenal of great weapons to choose from to dispatch each and every one of them. There’s your standard sniper rifle, machine gun and rocket launcher, but there’s a whole lot more fun to be had with the crazy weapons that can be found at the Pub. Yes, the place to buy your weapons and restore your energy is the pub, quite traditional English looking pubs too. Weapons available from them include the Land Shark Gun that fires fin, connected to a shark which leaps out of the ground to devour your hapless foe. Then there’s the Guy Fawks Traitor Bomb, which makes the enemy turn on each other, and the Black Hole bomb that sucks everything around it into it, and disappears with a slight ‘pop’. There’s a whole heap more, but I’m not going to spoil it any further.

Not only can you kill lots of baddies, you can kill innocent bystanders, like sheep, penguins and peasants. You can also make a hell of a dent on the landscape, as nearly all of it is destructible. This is a game where the rule is if it moves, kill it, if it doesn’t, blow it up, just in case. However, like other shooters, at the end of missions you’re actually scored on things like accidents (killing livestock or innocent peasants, blowing up peasant houses) headshots and a few other stats that you can find in any other shooter. However, unlike those there doesn’t seem to be much point other than just a score. Which, when you think about it, is quite funny. All those other shooters are all so serious about things, and people play online and get so caught up with scores. This game throws that in your face, and has a laugh about it all.

One thing hampering the fun is the controls. They’re not standard shooter controls, and I often found myself becoming confused during hefty battles. The right trigger fires, and the A button is jump, which is quite standard, but the left trigger acts as a zoom, whereas in nearly every other shooter it’s used as secondary attack. The B button acts as secondary attack, which I found to be rather inconvenient, as I’d press A or X (reload) by accident. I also had trouble with the changing of weapons, which is used by the d-pad. Up/Down changes the main, and left/right changes the secondary weapon. In the heat of battle, fighting airship and turrets, and hordes of mean metal men, it becomes a chore to use the dpad. The action is so fast and furious that moving your thumb off the left joystick to cycle through weapons leaves you at a disadvantage, even though only slight, and it just feels totally odd in this game, although other, slower paced games use the same set up.

Another gripe is the AI, as in what AI? Sure, it’s a game of run and gun, but you have teammates, and whilst they can be ordered about, it’s at a real basic level, and they always seem to die. They’re good shots when they’re alive, but that’ll only be for half the mission. The enemy AI isn’t too bad really, if intelligence is to stand in the open and shoot you. Although if you kill one of the baddies manning a turret, another baddie will run up and man it in his stead, which is pretty clever. Yet, at the end of the day, because of this, the gameplay does become repetitive, very repetitive.

However, the cutscenes give you a reason to tolerate the gameplay. As well as being funny, (it’s worth playing this game for the one cut scene that ridicules Star Wars in such a hilarious fashion I still giggle about it!) the cutscenes are quite good graphically. The rest of the game looks great too, although the levels can seem repetitive. Whilst the environments look really cool, there’s a lack of distinction to each area. The houses and other props to blow up, and the baddies all look the same. Yet surprisingly there’s little slowdown, even with tonnes of enemies on screen, so I guess the sameness is related to a memory thing, and we can over look that when you have scores of 10,000 bullets fired and 300 + enemies dead.

There are currently two more levels to download, but despite what it says on the back cover, this game has NO online multiplayer, either through systemlink or Live! A co-operative feature would have made this game so incredibly fun that people’s heads would explode, and a must buy for fans of multiplayer shoot ’em ups, but alas, this is sorely missing. It may have been interesting on Live, or it could have been a total dud, so there’s no point pondering about that aspect, but either of these could have added more replayability to the game.

Conclusion:
Armed and Dangerous is pure, unadulterated, shooting fun. It captures the heart and hilarity of the old Sam & Max games, as well as offering a fresh coat of paint to a tired genre. If you’re looking for anything more, you’re not going to find it here, but that’s the beauty of the game and why it stands out above the plethora of shooters out there. The absence of co-operative play is a serious let down, as it is so much fun and could be doubly so with another person. The absence of online multiplayer is also a let down, but most people DON’T have broadband or Live! and it would probably seem like a pretty generic shooter anyway.

Pros
+ Furious Fantastic Fighting Fun!
+ Masses of enemies to kill
+ Destructive environments
+ Some of the funniest cutscenes to ever grace the Xbox.
+ Largest Kill Count of any shooter on Xbox

Cons
– No Co-op or Live! Play
– Controls are a bit awkward
– the window dressing is a little repetitive
– as is the action

82/100