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With Armorines on the Nintendo 64 being only so-so, I was not expecting to find the Game Boy version to be all that much better. Acclaim Entertainment has not had the greatest track record with their Game Boy titles; the Turok and WWF series of games have never been that great. Armorines is no better than the other lumps of cartridges that they have produced, if not worse.

The plot is as generic and lame as it was on the Game Boy's bigger brother, except now certain features that made the Nintendo 64 game interesting have been stripped away. Aliens from only god knows where have begun invading our peaceful planet of Earth and have plans to rid the world of humans and claim it all for their own. Instead of being the tall, slim gray aliens that most had expected to find attacking us, we have bugs similar to those in the science fiction movie Starship Troopers. Players only get to take control of one single character this time, not the two that were offered in the N64 version.

The problems in Armorines are readily apparent right from the start. Specifically, it all begins with the control. There are two main options for shooting that are given to the player, though neither one works particularly well. The first one involves moving around using the up, down, left and right buttons like you would expect, but the enemy bugs are so fast moving, and your character moves so sharply that it becomes quite impossible to get anywhere with this control scheme. The secondary form involves strafing, commonly used in first person shooters (which is what the Nintendo 64 game was), where the character will only move in two directions, depending on which way you are facing. This works a wee bit better, but the downside is that you don't have the maneuverability in being able to easily face all directions that you did before. Either way, most of the fun that might have been able to be found in the game is lost right away thanks to the control.

Armorines takes advantage of the Game Boy Color's pallete abilities in its environments, but looks as if a small amount of time was spent creating the actual enemies. Many of them consists of one solid color (i.e. green) and have little detail put into them. They all look more like hopping frogs than the deadly, evil, despicable aliens that they are supposed to be.

More damage is caused by the fact that the enemies regenerate each time you leave an area, and there is some backtracking involved, so it becomes an exponential pain to make it through the various stages in Armorines. Defeating the enemies is already difficult with the lame control, and the swarming (hey, maybe that's why they call it Project S.W.A.R.M., eh?) of enemies as they regenerate when you return to a room makes things all that more tedious and frustrating.

The clear casing is probably the best part about Armorines; the rest of the game should be avoided. Acclaim's Turok: Rage Wars title on the Game Boy Color is a much superior game, and deserves your attention much more than this does.