1.7? One-point-seven average score on Backloggd, and that’s after my rating??? Do we not actually play the video games we rate on there? When Mario kills a thousand turtles it’s “cute” and “peak” and “formative game design”, but when Acclaim/NEON has you shoot a couple dozen it sucks? Boris Triebel was the director on this, did you think one of the creators of P. P. Hammer and His Pneumatic Weapon suddenly forgot how to make a damn video game?
A terrible opinion that I earnestly, sincerely hold is that Acclaim was overall a good publisher. Good, not great, but good! Sure they were a license farm for the most part and stuff like Chef’s Luv Shack is indefensible, but a lot of their output represented better attempts at adaptation than most in their heyday could manage. Armorines, though, may as well had been one of their original IPs for all it mattered. Even Valiant doesn’t consider Armorines worth remembering; you have to hit up the Wayback Machine to see it acknowledged on any of their sites. These people want you to remember Bloodshot and they can barely be bothered to add this to their long-ass list?
Anyway, Acclaim realized the Armorines squabbling with their handlers in D.C. wasn’t going to make for much of a video game and opted to just make Dollar Store Satire-Free Starship Troopers for the 3D consoles. The GBC game developed by NEON took the same tack, but turns it into a top down shooter that’s far better than most on the system. The criticisms I’ve seen of it are that it’s easy to get lost, is annoyingly hard, looks ugly, and repeats itself. I’m here to tell you that exactly one of those is true.
Armorines GBC sees you playing as an exterminator named Sgt. Snider having a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. The escalation of said day is fairly gradual and your power scales to match. At the start of the game you’re using a glorified bug zapper, weak and limited in range. The enemies are similarly tiny, both in size and number. Not the best first impression! Fortunately you get guns fairly quickly, the enemies get more dangerous, and the reasons to complain start to fade. You even get to destroy a few oil derricks midway through! Armorines confirmed based!
Your inputs are movement, A to shoot with free aim while moving, and B to shoot while strafing. Being able to swap between both is a godsend as several rooms demand that flexibility, though for whatever reason you can’t strafe while aiming diagonally. The last button of note, select, pulls up a reminder of your current objective in case you took a bit too long of a break. Nifty! It’s a simple control scheme without any kind of movement tricks and the gameplay is built around that, opting to gradually increase the difficulty of its combat encounters rather than do too much with level hazards until the late game. There’s even a nice QoL touch where enemies announce their awareness of you with various squawks, even when entirely offscreen, so you almost always get a heads up before things get spicy.
Environmental interactables only require you to walk into them, so you’re unlikely to miss important items or objectives. This is further assisted by a color palette that makes good use of the GBC, meaning it’s the polar opposite of its 3D counterpart, which loves nothing more than dumping you into the darkest bug-filled caves this side of an Earth Defense Force game. It’s surprisingly easy to parse for a Game Boy game, and I never found myself unsure of how to progress with one exception in the second to last area, which was only because I needed to walk up a cliff and just kind of assumed I couldn’t because it was the same color as the walls. Look, I’m dumb as hell and got through this, you can do it too.
Odds are if you’re on this website you won’t struggle either. Armorines is honestly pretty easy past like, level 2. I didn’t lose a life until I touched an instant death trap in the last area, and was shocked when the game informed me that I had 11 more banked that I ended up not needing. Health pickups are generous, enemy placements are fair, their respawns are nonexistent for the first 3/4 of the game (in a nice touch they wait until there’s a thematic justification for doing so), and your weapons get crazy powerful by the end. I was a particularly big fan of the short ranged plasma gun and the laser, and the game likes to hand you special weapons for boss encounters so you’ll never be stuck with something that doesn’t work. The greatest sin this game commits in terms of its gameplay is having a fairly weak spread gun, but you’ll make do. My only piece of advice is to break out the Ghouls & Ghosts tactics and skip picking up the lightning gun whenever it shows up, that thing never gets meaningfully better.
The only notable criticism I have for this is fairly obvious – all you’re ever really doing is moving through levels and shooting guys to secure the prize. I’d be more annoyed if the areas weren’t varied or if the game wasn’t so short. We’re talking a couple hours tops here, and while they aren’t amazing or anything they’re hardly dull unless you just don’t like the gameplay in its own right. If this came out on the NES it’d be heralded as a “hidden gem” on every retro YouTube channel, but instead it was a Game Boy game with an Acclaim logo, which means it can’t possibly be good, right guys? Like and subscribe so you won’t miss when your next opinion arrives!
I will always advocate for playing games past the first level. First impressions aren’t everything, especially when you’re sampling seemingly-infinite roms for games that were meant to be stuck with, not taste-tested back to back. I just wanted to play an action game a bit better than Annihilator – imagine my shock when I was actually having fun! There’s a very real chance this is the best piece of Armorines media that’s ever existed, and you know now that I say that, maybe Valiant was right to chuck it into the memory hole.
…seriously though, Acclaim released some of the best games of the era. All the Turoks are good, even Rage Wars, and Shadow Man is better than Ocarina! I’m not afraid to say it! Fuck you, nostalgia police! Re-Volt is better than Mario Kart 64! I liked Iggy’s Reckin’ Balls! Get your hands off me, you pigs! Just wait until I tell you how South Park Rally isn’t even a bad game! AIIIIIIIEEEE!
3.5/5
Wack Game Boy Zone 