Touch the lava and you're dead, get swarmed by the baddies and you're dead, and even running out of ammo will likely end in death.

The penultimate level in particular, the dreaded Lava Palaver, tasked players with using a single medic buddy to save four aliens while simultaneously facing off against eight heavily-armed baddies.Ĭoming from the same label that brought us the WipEout series, it's no surprise that Team Buddies has an accomplished soundtrack. When I eventually got around to sampling the single-player campaign, the smile was quickly wiped from my face, as although the game eased you in gently by rescuing farmers pigs, by the time you reached the eighth world the difficulty had been ratcheted up to nightmarish proportions. So I spent the next five minutes running around the map with the faster ninja, pressing the swear button as I went, and the look on his face after securing a cheap draw was priceless. He had a commando buddy with a flamethrower, and I had an unarmed ninja buddy.

I remember one game where it came down to me and a friend with just one buddy each. Of course the best laid plans often went to hell as friends ganged up to take down the best player - before breaking allegiances and destroying each other. It wasn't particularly deep but players could play the long game by stacking crates in combinations of four to get better buddies and heavy weapons - eventually storming the enemy base with an eight-crate tank - or instead rush the competition with a full squad of double-crate economy buddies, each armed with single-crate light weapons. Despite looking like a pseudo-LEGO game designed for ages five and up, Team Buddies required a degree of strategy to take out the enemy.

Team buddies 2