[360] Toy Soldiers Review

[Bandango]

Toy Soldiers Review

Title: Toy Soldiers
Platform: XBLA
Developer: Signal Studios
Publisher: Microsoft Game Studios
ESRB: Teen
MSRP: $15
Editor: Mike Bellmore

What's Hot: Satisfying and accessible tower defense strategery; Mindless turret manning; Impressive numbers of bad guys and explosions on screen at once; Large maps that, unlike most tower defense, create the illusion of an open battlefield.

What's Not: Broken multiplayer; A sluggish beginning; Poorly controlled airplanes.

Name the last good World War I game you’ve played. Name any World War I game. I’m sure you’ll agree that it’s an underrepresented subject if there ever was one. And what a good subject it can be. Grim moonscapes constantly battered by monumental pieces of artillery. Arcane weaponry that wouldn’t look out of place in the middle ages right alongside machine guns, tanks and airplanes. Trenches and barbed wire. Trench foot and mustard gas. Enough moving targets to drain an entire generation of young men.

The first war does offer certain challenges, as far as design goes. An FPS might not make the most sense. Trying to sleep in a foot of icy mud for twelve hours during a hellish bombardment only to charge topside and get mowed down by a Maxim machine gun may not be the most exciting thing in the world. An RTS could be dicey too. Three years of stalemate wouldn’t translate well into an hour long multiplayer match. So what would work on the WW1 battlefield? What genre would complement static warfare, slow moving vehicles, and endless waves of impotent infantry? Why, Tower defense of course. Toy Soldiers is just that.

As the name implies, Toy Soldiers isn’t simply a tower defense game set in the first war; it’s a tower defense game that’s set in a table-top wargame that’s set in the first war. The pieces in this wargame are, naturally, alive, and the goal is to defend your toy box from waves of these animate enemy models. Between your toy box and incoming infantry, armor, and airplanes are networks of trenches dotted by hardpoints. Turrets are built on these hardpoints: machine guns, mortars, gas, anti-air, and artillery. Each turret is upgradable to a third, most powerful tier, and in some cases the upgrade drastically alters the turret’s function instead of simply increasing its potency.

Turrets can also be manned, bringing you over the shoulders of the crew operating them. The shift from the quieter, almost serene top-down strategic view to the turret view is dramatic. What’s a cloud of scurrying dots from above becomes an overwhelming horde of men rushing over no-man’s land; your autonomous turrets blast them skyward and cut into them with streams of bullets, all while you attempt to mow down as many as you can yourself. It can be a real rush when waves start piling up.

Unfortunately that rush won’t come until later in the game, at least if you have your difficulty set to normal. Toy Soldiers has a very gentle learning curve, introducing new turrets, upgrades and enemies at what felt like, to me anyway, a snail’s pace. Many of the earlier stages are plain boring. Once all the turret types and upgrades are unlocked, though, everything starts to open up. And while 5 turret types means that maximizing placement doesn’t take a brain surgeon, building an impenetrable line of defenses is never anything less than satisfying.

But Toy Soldiers is not its most fun when idly watching enemy soldiers immolated. Luckily, there’s more to do than just building turrets and manning them. Biplanes are made available early in the game. You can hop into them, tool around, drop bombs, strafe troops, and dogfight other air units. And while they do act as a nice diversion from the game’s early ease and repetition, they control like wet noodles. Crimson Skies style auto-maneuvers are sorely missing. Later on you can pilot even clumsier bombers, but their heavy payloads provide sufficient motivation to keep you struggling until you get the hang of their obtuse controls.

Toy Soldiers didn’t really click with me until I got behind the wheel of a tank. They’re real game changers; they give you a physical presence on the battlefield from which you can still command. When you exit the tank and return to the strategic view, a 10 second timer appears over it. You have just enough time to build, upgrade, or repair a turret or two before hopping back in the tank, still where you want it to be, still ready to blow away many, many things. If that timer runs out though, the tank auto-destructs and returns to its spawn point where you’ll have to wait a solid thirty seconds before accessing it again. Keeping your tank in play can sometimes mean the difference between success and failure. At times I felt this 10 second timer was an artificial, if not shallow, way to drum up tension, but that tension is exactly what was missing for much of the first half of the game, so I happily accepted it.

Enemy turrets are introduced at about the same time as the tank. When you start a new level, enemy mortars, artillery, and AA are spread out around the battlefield. Often times your own hardpoints will be in range of their bombardment, so before you start building defenses, you have to use your vehicles to take these hostile emplacements out. There’s usually some element of ‘what do I have to do first’ to each map. If you don’t take out the right turrets before the first wave, restarting will be necessary. Once an enemy emplacement is destroyed, you can build your own turrets on the empty hardpoint. Usually these will be within range of other enemy turrets, so while your defenses are holding off the Huns, you always have something to do with your vehicles.

As for the multiplayer... it has potential. In addition to building turrets, you can also access an offensive build menu by pressing Y. From here, you can purchase waves of tanks, cavalry, etc that attack your opponent’s toy box. Unfortunately there are some major kinks that need to be worked out. Vehicles are easily exploited. On some maps, if you correctly angle your tank, all of the opponent’s hardpoints are exposed to its fire. Enemy turrets can be destroyed faster than they can be built. The airplanes are borked too. By piloting your plane into the enemy’s toy box, you can take away 1 of their 20 health tickets. Doing this again and again makes a huge difference in the long run, and if you play online, expect everyone to do this again and again. I don’t blame them for it; it works. But it’s boring. Instead of engaging in dogfights or harassing your lines, opponents simply kamikaze. It detracts from what could otherwise be an exciting exchange. And to make things worse, there is no effective countermeasure.

Besides the currently broken multiplayer and the initial lethargy of the single player, Toy Soldiers is a remarkably solid XBLA game. Each mission has a special objective that unlocks a bit of in-game swag. The highest difficulty level completely changes gameplay by making turrets useless unless directly controlled. And after finishing the initial campaign, a more challenging, and frankly far superior, German campaign is unlocked. There’s a lot here, and I think it makes a contribution to the genre. Toy Soldiers opens up tower defense in ways I haven’t seen before. Despite the fact that the bad guys are supposed to be models, they don’t seem like tin men marching in straight lines to their death. This game creates the illusion of a real battlefield, even if you can see the edges of the toy box around it.

Score: 3.5 out of 5 CoGs


Mike says, "Fifteen bucks won't break the bank, so if you dig the WW1 backdrop give it a try. You'll have fun."

[Deadend]

Sounds cool 760.

[Chimpbot]

Sounds interesting enough, although $15 always feels steep for Arcade games


957

[Tayaya]

573!

Sorry. Needed to be done.

[Mike Kelehan]

I'll say... 1200.

Originally Posted by Tayaya

573!

Sorry. Needed to be done.

Hi, I'm the one other guy who knows what he's talking about.

[Spockrocket]

Gonna have to give this a try.

btw 1500

[Wombat]

I declare 742 ! By the way, how are you going to stop two different people picking the same number?

[Tayaya]

Originally Posted by Mike Kelehan

Hi, I'm the one other guy who knows what he's talking about.

LOL. I knew it would be you!

[KillerMcDead]

I wanna kill me some Nazis!

333

[Savok]

1368

I've been ignoring XBLA recently, this may very well put a stop to that.

And I'd love a WW1 RTS, be nice to be able to fight that war properly.

Also in that first screenshot, is that a slouch hat I spot?

[Scull]

42

This one looks pretty interesting.

[Talanvor]

For some reason I thought this was going to be some weird spin off of Army Men.

I like how "Mindless turrent manning" is one of the Pros.

Oh, come on, no one?

666 /Maiden

[Tebrin22]

Looks like fun!

777

[Iron Past]

Hey sounds good. I'll likely pick it up even if I don't win; I've been playing mostly Arcade games on my X360 lately for some reason.

Hmm. 1342.

[Acidpoptart]

I love the look and the demo was pretty fun. It is unfortunate about the multi player issues, but hopefully they will get ironed out.

989

[ThievesAmongUs]

619.

Meh, I'll shoot for it anyway.

[Dag-Sabot]

Id like to try this! 1903

[WhyThree]

1050

I played the demo and enjoyed it. The boss was pretty epic for a game about toy soldiers.

[Draggnknucks]

1223! Come on free things!

[GiantAshSnake]

I played the demo and it was pretty good, but the $15 price point seems like a bit much.

1109