But that was the charm of the Army Men series. You didn’t buy it for polish. You bought it because you wanted to melt your little brother’s soldiers with a plastic flamethrower.
The titular Turf Wars mechanic is where the game tries to stand out. Unlike a standard linear shooter, each level has "control points." You don’t just need to kill the Tans; you need to stand on their side of the garden gnome long enough to raise your flag. This turns the game into a constant push-pull. You can clear a room of enemies, but if you don’t physically stand in the corner by the discarded AA battery, the Tan forces will respawn and take it back.
Toy Soldiers, Real Rivalry: Revisiting Army Men Advance 2 – Turf Wars on GBA
From the moment the cartridge boots up, Turf Wars embraces its gimmick. The levels aren't just "jungles" or "deserts"—they are kitchen floors , sandboxes , and basement workshops . The camera hangs at a fixed isometric angle, giving you a god’s-eye view of the carnage. You can see the grain of the wooden floorboards. A spilled bag of flour becomes a blinding snowstorm. A fallen stack of dominoes becomes a fortress. Juego Army Men Advance 2 - Turf Wars GBA
Today, Army Men Advance 2: Turf Wars sits in the dusty bargain bin of gaming history. The 3DO company is long gone. The Army Men franchise has been MIA for nearly two decades. But for a kid with a Game Boy Advance SP in the back of a minivan, this game was a pocket-sized sandbox of destruction.
It captured the essence of childhood warfare: the imagination required to see a vacuum cleaner as a monster, or a dropped coin as a shield. It wasn't trying to be realistic. It was trying to be fun .
You play as Sarge (or a generic grunt in multiplayer), and the plot is as thin as the plastic these soldiers are made of: The Tan Army has invaded the "Real World" zones, and you must push them back turf by turf. The gameplay is a top-down cover shooter before Gears of War made that a household term. You hide behind a stack of poker chips, pop out, hose down a row of Tan soldiers, then rush forward to pick up their flamethrower ammo. But that was the charm of the Army Men series
In the sprawling, green-tinted pantheon of budget gaming, few franchises understood their assignment as perfectly as the Army Men series. These weren't games trying to be Call of Duty . They were the video game equivalent of shoving two shoeboxes full of plastic soldiers together and declaring war on the living room rug. And on the Game Boy Advance, no entry captured that scrappy, diorama-battling spirit quite like .
It’s a primitive version of Battlefield’s conquest mode, and on the GBA, it feels revolutionary for exactly ten minutes—until a respawning Tan jeep runs you over for the fifth time. Then, it feels like a delightful torture.
The sound design is quintessential GBA crackle: tinny machine-gun fire that sounds like popcorn, the plink of a grenade bouncing off a plastic tank, and the iconic scream of a Green soldier melting into a puddle of goo. It’s not immersive in the way Metroid is. It’s immersive in the way a Saturday morning cartoon is—loud, bright, and instantly comforting. The titular Turf Wars mechanic is where the
What makes Turf Wars surprisingly tense is the fragility. You are a one-inch-tall toy. A single direct hit from a mortar or a rogue drop of molten plastic from a blown-up lamp will annihilate you. There are no regenerating health bars here. You find a green ration pack (which looks suspiciously like a lump of Play-Doh) and you keep moving.
Released in 2004 by 3DO and developed by DC Studios, Turf Wars arrived at a strange time. The GBA was saturated with ports of SNES classics and ambitious 3D experiments that ran at 15 frames per second. But here was a game that knew exactly what it was: an isometric, run-and-gun shooter where the most dangerous thing you could step on wasn't a landmine, but a stray pencil.
A 7/10. Bring extra AA batteries. For your GBA, not the soldiers.
Let’s be honest: this is not a hidden masterpiece. The isometric aiming is janky. You will often fire at a wall because the perspective makes a Tan soldier look like he’s three inches to the left when he is actually behind a cereal box. The voice clips are garbled to the point of sounding like dial-up internet. And the difficulty spikes are absurd—one mission is a leisurely stroll through a garden, the next is a nightmare of enemy mortars raining from off-screen.
And if you can look past the dated graphics and the imprecise controls, you’ll find a fast, frantic, and gloriously silly shooter that understands one simple truth: war, when fought by plastic toys, never gets old.