The first thing you notice about Armed and Dangerous is its decidedly British tone. Along the lines of the humor displayed in Rockstar North’s Grand Theft Auto series and Rare’s Conker’s Bad Fur Day, the humor is somewhat off its rocker, but is so twisted and zany that you will be laughing out loud during the game’s cutscenes. In one instance, a character has been out in the cold too long; to warm him up our heroes decide to cut open the belly of a fallen animal and place him in the entrails (guess where the reference is from). To much surprise, the robot simply jams the cold character up the not-quite-dead animal’s butt, which then leads to very humorous results.

The game itself follows the adventures of Roman, a human; Jonesy, a mole; and Q, a robot who became sentient from his love of tea. These three together form the Lionhearts, a group of outlaws opposed to King Forge’s rule. Forge stole The Book of Rule from Rexus, Roman’s adopted father, long ago. They joined up with the old man in the wastelands and set out to recover the book and overthrow the King.

For most of the game, you take on the role of Roman in the third person and proceed to blow a whole lot of stuff up. With a nice arsenal of crazy weapons -- including a gun that shoots a live shark into the ground that proceeds to eat your enemies, Jaws-style -- you make your way from the frozen wastelands to Wildwood Abbey and steal the book from the King. Other parts of the game put you in a massive turret atop a wall with hundreds of Forge’s men attempting to get to the other side. Here you have access to a massive gun and mortars that you can use to lay waste. The attackers will come at you in waves, before making a huge rush at the end. Utilizing explosive barrels placed on the battlefield, you need to keep a specific number of enemies from jumping the wall.

When you are controlling Roman, Jonesy and Q will follow, for the most part, and provide accompanying fire for the hundreds of enemies you will face in any given level. Objectives vary from level to level. In one, you must destroy six pre-determined targets; others will require you to save a member of your party, or simply visit a local pub and get some explosives.

While progressing through many of the levels, you will come upon gun turrets behind sandbags that you can jump into, as well as turrets that shoot rockets. These come in handy with the endless supply of bad guys who come after you. With all those enemies, you will have to adapt your standard play techniques to not run in guns-a-blazing and get your ass handed to you. Armed and Dangerous, even with an action game core, does require some thinking as the enemies in the game are insanely cheap at times and the rather dumb AI of your comrades doesn’t help keep you alive any longer than if you were fighting alone.

At times the game becomes extremely hard, if only to keep things spicy. After blowing up everything to oblivion on the screen, you progress on to the next area only to find you must have missed something because you are getting shot in the back. It takes you a minute to realize that the enemies ahead, who have premonitions of you before you ever enter their line of sight, aren’t shooting; rather the bullets are flying from behind. To add insult to injury, the AI is very keen about jumping into unmanned gun turrets and laying waste to you faster than you can say “quick load.”

The game looks very good, not full of detail, but with so much stuff blowing up around you and moving through the game so fast you won’t find the time to admire the scenery. The character models look nice, even with some goofy run animations for the enemies in the game. On a modest Athlon XP 1700+ system with a 64MB Radeon 7200 and 512 MB DDR RAM, the game ran excellent, without any noticeable slowdown, even with more than a dozen enemies on screen at the same time.

The real high point of the game is the previously described humor. That humor couldn’t be portrayed as well as it is without some excellent voice acting, and Armed and Dangerous possesses just that. The aforementioned British twist of the game is only accentuated by your Scottish mole and proper robot. In fact, while most gamers may want to skip the action-breaking cutscenes, you really should let them play once the first time through, if only to get a hearty laugh from the game’s loose story and likeable characters. The only downer is the highly compressed video format in which the scenes are presented. You can tell they were captured using the game’s engine but then included as movies rather than rendered in real-time. Maybe Planet Moon wanted to be sure players could follow the story coherently even if the game ran very poorly during regular gameplay, but even then the amount of compression is ridiculous considering this game requires almost 4GBs to install, which is ridiculous in its own right.

Armed and Dangerous is really a one-trick pony: You have lots of firepower, a loose story drenched in a healthy layer of humor, and can provide all the action we could ever want in a video game. Still, when you take a step back and look at it, the game does get somewhat repetitive after hours of blowing up building after building and killing generic bad guy after generic bad guy. What helps the game in the long run is the quirky pop-culture-spoofing humor and the anticipation of what the Lionhearts will do next. Fans of action games, first-person shooters, and reflex-testing courses will love this game, while others might be turned off by the difficulty and redundant nature.