Plastic Army Men Make a Video Game Comeback in 'Mean Greens'

With techno-pop music blasting, I sprint up a platform of plastic forks, take a flying leap onto a bright red Jell-O mold, and bounce into the air. An exaggerated sproiiing noise flings my little plastic army man up the tiers of a ten-year-old's frosted birthday cake. Landing on the second tier, I swap to a flamethrower and start igniting one of the birthday candles.

Suddenly, an enemy army man runs around the bend of the cake and spots me. I cheese it, sprinting around the curve of the cake and blasting unlit candles as I go. We end up at the top of the cake with the candle cake-topper. I dance around the giant number 10 candle, blasting it with my flamethrower and keeping it between my enemy and me. Just as the candle starts burning, he catches me with a blast. I die laughing.

The rarest quality in video games is joy. Pure, unbridled joy is so uncool, so painfully unhip, that most games avoid it. There are plenty of bleak sci-fi worlds and bleak post-apocalyptic worlds and bleak near-future worlds in gaming, and I'm kind of sick of all of them.

The Mean Greens: Plastic Warfare, by developer Virtual Basement, is a new online multiplayer shooter that features little plastic army men going to war in colorful, oversized domestic environments. It's fast, silly, and full of the whimsy so few games are brave enough to chase.

This isn't the first time that a big bucket of plastic army figures in green and tan, the ubiquitous childhood toy, has made its way to video games. Back in 1998, 3DO launched Army Men, a series of strategy and shooter games based on guiding an army of green plastic soldiers through their war against the evil tan army. Sadly, the Army Men games have been effectively dead since 3DO went bankrupt a decade ago.

Mean Greens was clearly inspired by the Army Men series. It divides players into two teams of five, one side as the green team and one side as the tan team. The battlegrounds are all inspired by the arenas of childhood domesticity: pristine kitchen countertops, an iced-over freezer, a model train set, a sudsy bathtub. From their miniature vantage point, players run tiny soldiers through cups full of art supplies, hunt inside a labyrinthine mountain of birthday presents, and assault a castle made of Lego.

There's an affinity for the joys of childhood in Mean Greens, and its greatest strength is it doesn't take itself too seriously. Each map also comes with its own special game mode, so players aren't just running around counting kills in different environments. My birthday cake assault story happened in Operation Birthday: one team has to assault a 4-tier birthday cake and light the candles with their flamethrowers while the other team fends them off.

In Barnyard Ball, the battle takes place on a farm-animal themed foosball table; players have to drive a plastic soccer ball into the goal, gunning down the defending team all the while. Giant foosball players slide back and forth, making the level constantly shift and change. It's brilliant exactly because it's so ludicrous.

I think everyone should check out Mean Greens, but I'm a little bit worried about recommending it because as a multiplayer-only game, it depends on other people joining for matches. At any given point this launch week, I saw only a couple dozen people playing the game worldwide. If that population dwindles to nothing, new players will have no one to play with and no way to experience the game at all.

It's also incredibly simple when compared to big-budget shooters like Call of Duty and Battlefield, with few weapons you learn how to use like a complicated musical instrument. It's fun for the first couple of hours, but it's just going to be the same fun, over and over again, without much room to evolve.

However, there's so little joy in PC shooters right now that I hope Mean Greens will become a hit the way Nintendo's Splatoon was over the summer. For now, with Fallout 4 continuing to suck all the oxygen out of the room in the gaming ecosystem, online shooter fans might one day notice that they missed this colorful, lovely gem of a game.

Mean Greens: Plastic Warfare is out now for Windows PC.