Is Arnie 2 the unsung commando classic you never knew you needed, or a bizarre relic that should have stayed stashed in a dusty Babbage’s bargain bin? Do four scrolling missions of grenade-spamming glory earn it a berth alongside Cannon Fodder and Ikari Warriors, or does it merely flex pixel muscles in a dazzling display of “all brawn, no brain”? (Spoilers: yes, no, and kind of.) Released in 1993 by Zeppelin Games, the sequel to 1992’s budget shooter arrives on DOS with a chunky pseudo-isometric camera, a protagonist whose name is one umlaut away from a copyright lawsuit, and enough exploding barrels to fill three ’80s action montages. Underrated? Only in the sense that few critics bothered rating it at all. Overrated? Impossible—its fan club could fit in a Jeep. Essential? If you judge games by how often they force you to chew keyboard in frustration, absolutely.
Historical Context
Set your flux capacitors to 1993: id Software is busy teaching us the gospel of textured walls, Bullfrog is engineering Syndicate’s suits-and-shotguns dystopia, and Sega is shipping Gunstar Heroes to remind consoles how run-and-gun should feel. Meanwhile, up in the British Midlands, Zeppelin Games—purveyors of glorious budget cassettes for the 8-bit crowd—decides to double down on muscle-bound mayhem. Their first Arnie—coded by Realms of Fantasy—was a side-scrolling curiosity on C64 and Amiga, but the sequel is an in-house production, a self-aware homage to every boot-camp B-movie Schwarzenegger never filmed.
Zeppelin’s timing is both perfect and tragic. Perfect, because shareware PCs are starving for cheap action that doesn’t involve rescuing lemmings. Tragic, because the shadow of Doom will obliterate all top-down shooters mere weeks after Arnie 2 reaches High-Street shelves. My personal timeline: Doom shareware disk in one hand, Arnie 2 budget box in the other, teenage wallet crying, CRT glowing. Guess which disk loaded first? (Hint: it wasn’t the one with John Carmack’s autograph line.) Yet Arnie 2 secured a stubborn foothold in my after-school rotation, wedged between Cannon Fodder demo disks and Desert Strike cartridge sessions. It was the perfect “dad’s-PC-can-run-this” counter-programming to the 486-only framerate snobs.
Historically, Zeppelin marketed the game under multiple regional monikers—the U.S. DOS release cheekily re-badged as Arnie Savage: Combat Commando—but the core résumé remained intact: four self-contained missions, eight-way scrolling, single-player only, three-button simplicity, and not a license lawyer in sight. Budget branding kept expectations low; the exercise here was less “console-killer” and more “snackable carnage for five quid.”
Mechanics
Boot the executable and a digitised riff greets you—think garage-band Megadeth filtered through AdLib brass. The menu barks Arnie’s marching orders with drill-sergeant subtlety: shut down a chemical plant, clear an airfield, leap battleship to battleship in a hostile harbour, liberate a jungle POW camp. Each mission is a minimovie. You helicopter-drop onto scrolling terrain, armed with an assault rifle of infinite rounds (apologies, physics), a pocketful of grenades that arc in satisfyingly parabolic violence, and the unspoken promise that everyone on-screen would rather be somewhere else.
Movement is tank-style: arrow keys pivot and stride; Ctrl fires; Alt lobs ordnance; Enter cycles any heavier loot you scavenge (flamethrower, shotgun, bazooka—nothing says “subtle infiltration” like a 40 mm rocket to the face). Arnie lunges in eight directions, yet bullets only travel cardinally, forcing diagonal kiting that’s part ballet, part bullet-hell anxiety. Chemical-plant pipes spew cyan goo while mortar teams arc claustrophobic shells; explosives burst in puke-green popcorn sprites.
Enemies lean on static placements—foxholes disgorge infantry, jeep turrets pan slowly, tanks shrug off rifle fire until you spoon-feed them grenades—but wandering patrols keep speed-runs twitchy. Finish a level with lives to spare and brag in silence; eat enough shrapnel and it’s back to mission one, because passwords are for the bourgeois.
Subsequent sorties escalate: an airfield of radar arrays and Roomba-dumb helicopters, a harbour of crate mines and downward-scrolling dreadnought decks, and a jungle POW camp whose extraction chopper appears only if you free every last prisoner (mis-count them and enjoy eternal 16-colour purgatory). Performance is clock-locked: a 386SX hits thirtyish FPS, but modern rigs turn Arnie into Sonic unless you throttle DOSBox cycles—a quirk speedrunners treat as a feature.
Hit detection is cocaine-thin, Arnie’s hitbox generous, crate corners lethally pointy; frustration loops until you master “spray-in-waves” shooting. Flamethrowers crisp foot soldiers into turkey-brown outlines, bazookas pop turrets with Play-Doh splatter. Andrew Rodger’s soundtrack is a heroic two-minute loop apt for late-night cable fitness ads, and sound channels triage themselves mid-firefight, heightening chaos. Control oddities (space bar does nothing, off-screen snipers do everything) spark expletive-laced rants; yet I kept rebooting. Pavlov would be proud.
My absurd running motif? The grenade pin. Every lobbed explosive spawns an imaginary pile of discarded pins somewhere off-screen—a metallic breadcrumb trail I can’t un-picture. Once you see it, the whole war zone feels like a slapstick hazard course littered with thumb-tack-sized shrapnel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KI6q-S_1myM8
Legacy and Influence
If Cannon Fodder is the Beatles of 16-bit run-and-gun, Arnie 2 is that garage EP 100 hipsters covet. Sales were modest; Zeppelin built its business on impulse-buy price tags, and the Amiga-to-PC migration of ’93 already had one foot in CD-ROM dreams. Critics shrugged—Amiga Joker slapped a 38 percent score on the Amiga build (PC Joker went lower at 35), and most DOS magazines gave it a paragraph at best. Yet the game carved a micro-cult for two reasons: a shareware-friendly sub-1 MB archive and a no-apology difficulty spike masochists adopted as a rite of passage.
Mechanically, its four-mission “lunch-break” structure foreshadowed episodic shooters. Infinite primary ammo with scarce heavy pickups feels downright modern, and the unintentional CPU-speed quirk granted today’s speedrunners a playground. While Zeppelin’s alumni largely vanished from the limelight, community affection bubbles up in abandonware videos, DOSBox forums, and recurring debates over that last MIA prisoner (spoiler: you missed a tent). Sites like GamesNostalgia still host a two-click installer, making Arnie’s gravel-voiced heroics eternally accessible.
Why stay niche? Budget stigma, an isometric angle that confused vertical-scroll veterans, and Cannon Fodder’s sharper satire stealing headlines. Sensible Software wrapped commentary around its firefights; Zeppelin wrapped raw challenge around its. In the ’90s, commentary scored points; pure pain got remaindered. But Arnie 2’s stubbornness is its charm. No patches, no apologies, no attempt at realism—just a pixelated ode to VHS-era machismo.
Closing Paragraph + Score
Should you throttle DOSBox to 10 000 cycles and hunt that elusive POW behind crate ninety-six? If you crave a 256-colour distillation of ’80s action cinema filtered through ’90s British bargain-bin swagger, absolutely. If you require analog sticks, checkpoints and HDR lens flare, head for the bunker—the grenade pins are everywhere. That, perhaps, is Arnie 2’s final joke: the toughest shrapnel isn’t on the screen but in your nostalgia tolerance.
Final verdict: 6.5 out of 10. Rough edges outnumber refined pixels, yet the riotous spirit, popcorn explosions and unseen mountain of grenade pins keep dragging me back for a guilty-pleasure victory lap. Hasta la vista, bargain-bin soldier.