Toy Soldiers: Reviewed (360)
When it comes to arcade games, there are some great ones out there, mixed within some of the poorer titles.
Without playing too many demos it can become a bit of a crap shoot but sometimes you get little gems that rear their heads and Toy Soldiers is definitely one of them.
The basic model and style of the game has been built around the style of a tower defence game with the shackles well and truly thrown off. Toy Soldiers certainly doesn’t feel as restrictive as other games in this genre and has added a few ideas that although may sound risky have been implemented very well.
Toy Soldiers, like any other defence game, is all about placing buildings, weapons and structures onto areas to repel the enemy from reaching your base, which is in this case an old fashioned toy box. Buildings and weapons come as standard for the first part but as you progress, you make cash which in turn allows you to upgrade and unlock key items that will help you along the next part of the mission. Most defense games of this nature work in this way but Toy Soldiers has some added extras that do make this stand out from the crowd.
Toy Soldiers places you into key battles that have taken place in World War 1. Each level requires you to first repel the enemy from reaching your toy box but in some levels to also attack key positions before you can successfully build your key defences to take out the remaining horde that are charging for your defences (that sounds like a World War 1 mentality too, right?)
As briefly mentioned before the game mechanics themselves deviate slightly from the traditional style of gameplay see in this genre. Building structures are restricted to certain placements or pre determined base plates to have them on which takes and element of strategy away from your defense but focusses on your control of unit builds instead to take the enemy down. Small and large bases are present to build your large and small guns on and managing your builds of units, planes, guns, fencing etc, although sounds somewhat risky works very well indeed. When I say there are hordes of enemy, I am referring more to different waves of certain units that need taking down so unit management, control and what you are building come to the fore more. Get it wrong and you risk getting overrun. Get it right and the pressure is off as you see those little fellas get mown down, blown up and generally pummelled. The other massive difference in this game is that you can also, and sometimes directed to, take over your units personally to attack the enemy with whatever unit you have selected. This may sound a little weird, especially because of all the other things that are going on around you, but again, something that could be considered risky has played out very well into the game mechanics due to how concise the gameplay mechanic has been modelled. Whether it be driving a slow but strong world war 1 tank to a nimble bi-plane to take out airial attacks this function, although being a cardinal sin in other games of this genre, works beautifully here and certainly adds another level of depth to the game as well as sometimes being the key factor in your victory.
The campaign contains 12 missions, that may sound substantial, but the majority of the missions – say the first 8 or 9 – only take around fifteen minutes to complete. The harder missions aren’t exactly longer, but they’ll definitely take you a few retries to complete.
There’s also the addition of difficulty settings, which isn’t unexpected for a tower defence based game. There are four to be exact; casual, normal, hard and the unlockable elite mode that forces you to use all of your units directly; which unless you’re completely adept at strategy games and insane levels of micromanagement, then I don’t see you playing this often.
On top of the campaign – that should take you around 5 hours – you have a multiplayer mode. This can be played offline in splitscreen, and through Xbox Live, and has you duelling with a maximum of two players. Oddly, there is no co-op mode here, this is literally you and one other player defending and attacking each other. At first, this was overwhelming, because not only do you have to work out your defences of what turrets go where, but you have to spend your hard earned cash on wave spawns as well, and this is a separate menu with the already included two menu screens you have to fiddle with. This doesn’t sound that bad, but with a controller, it was a steep learning curve.
Toy Soldiers stands out in a group of arcade titles that actually are worth the money you pay for them. The xbox Live arcade system is also perfectly suited to developers that want to create innovative and forward thinking game design which some feel has left us in the passed. Toy Soldiers definitely fits in with this definition an has brought to life a genre that, although great fun, had a strict set of rules that the genre was guided by. Toy Soldiers is worth the money, worth the time investing to play and definitely worthy of being considered one of the better games on Xbox Live.
