A fun third person shooter offering Brit humor
A&D, as the other reviewers have noted, is a resolutely comical take on the third-person shooter, but in this case the humor is very, very British. If you're a fan of Benny Hill, Monty Python, and other Brit acts you will be at home here; but if you’re not, I suspect a lot of the cultural references may be puzzling. The irritable mole Jonesy, for example, is a satire of the humanized animals featured in Brit literary works like "Wind in the Willows" and the Beatrix Potter and Rupert Bear stories. As well, his name is a takeoff on the fact that many Welshmen/women- Tom Jones, Brian Jones, Catherine Zeta-Jones - share the same surname. There is much joking about sheep, lambs, and peasants, tea consumption, and Jonesy's mother, all of it steeped in the atmosphere of a rural pub.
Graphics are not state of the art but are quite pleasant; the English countryside is well-realized and the soundtrack of Chieftains-style folk music gives the game a distinct identity that you won’t often find in many titles. A&D makes wearing tweed jackets and English Touring Caps (i.e., like that worn by Robert Redford in "The Sting"), hoisting pints of lukewarm Brit beer, and drunkenly singing cornball pub songs, actually seem like fun.
I didn't notice any bugs or framerate issues when I was playing.
It's unclear what Planet Moon is doing these days… their followup to A&D was the unremarkable, November 2005 zombie-themed shooter "Infected" for the PSP. They claim to be working on two new PSP titles at the moment, and are advertising for programmers and level designers so they must be financially solvent. I guess we'll have to see what it is they come up with…more A&D would be fine with me !