The game I played most this week: A.O.M.D. (Animals of Mass Destruction)

Animals vs. Terrorism: A.O.M.D. (Animals of Mass Destruction)

Geez, this game isn’t for the squeamish. Those who are highly sensitive might want to give it a pass, since it’s not the most politically correct game out there right now. In fact, I’m willing to bet it’ll be the most controversial Pocket PC game of 2007.  

The game actually has a very smart design: it’s an overhead scrolling action/puzzle game with a team-based model featuring three characters, each with a specialty. The backstory behind this very tongue-in-cheek game is that super-smart, highly trained animals have been trained by the government to counter terrorism throughout the world. Your three characters are: Puppy Love, a shotgun toting dog; Kitty Kung Fu, a stealthy cat; and Chicken, nerdy poultry with hacking skills.

After you complete training missions designed to acquaint you with each character’s special abilities, you then embark on 35 special missions. Obviously, each player’s abilities are better suited to certain situations. Sometimes it’s better to sneak around and avoid getting caught, other times it’s necessary to use brute force, and having a computer hacker allows you to get access to certain areas of enemy bases.

As you would expect, the missions require your three player-controlled characters to function as a time while leveraging each one’s strengths to overcome obstacles. Each player also has access to power-ups and berserk modes which temporarily make them much more powerful.

You are also allowed to capture prisoners, which brings me to a part of the game a few might find objectionable. When you’re at the mission selection screen, you have the option of torturing prisoners to get intelligence information. This is done through a “sliding bar” gauge that requires you to break the prisoner’s will without damaging their health (or they die, of course).

Successfully extracting information from a prisoner amounts to tapping the screen at just the right interval. Although the game does display the prisoner (all of which are animals) being strapped in a chair, it doesn’t display any graphic violence.

A.O.M.D. has a cartoony feel that’s vaguely Japanese-inspired and looks a bit crude on the Pocket PC. The in-game music definitely has a military feel which highlights the tongue-in-cheek nature of the game (the sampled voices, though, are pretty bad). Overall, the game is very clever, and the idea of having a specialized team of characters creates a lot of possibilities in terms of solving puzzles and accomplishing missions. After all, with a team, you can try different skill balances to see how they work.  

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Allen Gall's The Week in Games  Copyright © 2007 by Thaddeus Computing Inc.