Armed and Dangerous (2003)

Genre: 3rd Person Shooter | Players: 1 | Developer: Planet Moon Studios

Armed and Dangerous follows the exploits of a band of rebels called the Lionhearts as they attempt to steal the Book of Rule from the villainous King Forge and end his reign of tyranny. That sounds a bit epic, but it is really a tongue-in-cheek parody of those grand fantasy quests along with jabs at shooter cliches and references to Star Wars (probably because of publisher Lucasarts) and Monty Python with one character lamenting at one point that "this is turning into a bad fantasy novel."

Players control main character Roman and fight enemies with weapons that range from the conventional rifles and machine guns to the more fantastic Topsy Turvy bomb that reverses gravity and the Land Shark gun that true to its name fires whole sharks at the enemy. You can also give basic squad commands to your companions Jones, an anthropomorphic mole with a love for explosives, and Q, an obsessively tea drinking robot. With the squad and weapons, players complete missions like saving peasants, destroying towers and holding off invasion forces all with great humor and solid gameplay in levels that can be both linear and open world style particularly those with the jetpack. Bonus points for the great Tony Jay voicing King Forge.

Negative points are a weird difficulty curve with enemies that do almost no damage standing next to ones that will end you in 3 seconds, the weird and fun weapons have very limited ammo meaning players will rely on the boring but effective machine gun 90% of the time, almost every level has a hold off invasion portion at the end which isn't as fun as actual bosses and almost all NPC characters use the same ugly character model.

Buyer's Guide:
Can be found used for around 5 bucks for both Xbox and PC or you can buy it off Steam for $4.99.

4 Gardening robot soldiers wearing pigtails and sundresses out of 5