Toy Soldiers, for xbox 360

Rating: 7.5/10; Good

Played: April 2018

Requires both strategy and action skill, so only recommended for people who like both genres

Toy Soldiers is a tower defense game which allows you to take direct control of your towers, as well as snipers, tanks and aircraft. This is an excellent blend of action and strategy; incorporating turret/shooting gallery, vehicle combat and combat flight simulator play. Too bad you don’t get to play as one of the basic infantry that you start off with (though they are pretty much useless)

The rules of the game are quite simple. You have 1 or more bases that must be protected. Every time an enemy unit enters your base, you lose a health point. Lose them all and you are defeated. Enemies spawn in groups of the same type in preset patterns and take preset routes (which hurts replayability), and give money when killed. You use this money to build, repair and upgrade your turrets and to put down barbed wire (which only slows infantry and is destroyed by armor). It is up to you to manage how to spend the money, what types of turrets to build where, and where to focus your direct control. Survive all waves of enemies (sometimes including a very hard boss) to win. Enemies can also have turrets that destroy your vehicles and turrets, and you have to destroy them to be able to build on that spot. Fairly simple gameplay, but there is a lot that can happen depending upon what the player does and how well they shoot.

There is a good variety of turret types, though there is no type that specifically counters tanks. This makes sense for the WW1 setting though. Artillery and anti-air can only be built on large spaces, though you are able to build smaller turrets on large spaces if you want to. The game is quite challenging and it is likely that some levels will take multiple tries, especially the bosses which can easily wreck you if you do not have a proper set up. Taking direct control is fun and the player will be able to perform better than AI control (unless you are a terrible shot), though it is more efficient to control the sniper or vehicles (if they are available) because otherwise they will do nothing. The sniper is only good against infantry and cavalry. Bombers are somewhat hard to use for bombing, and have terrible manoeuvrability. Fighter aircraft and tanks are the most fun (and effective) to control, though vehicles are destroyed if you exit them to go check on your turrets (tanks take several seconds but that is not long enough to do anything unless you park right next to the turret you want to check), since you cannot interact with turrets while controlling a vehicle. They will respawn after a short while. Most of the game is a juggling act between controlling something (and jumping between them as you wait for respawn timers) and managing turrets. Spend too much time controlling something and you might miss the chance to repair a turret and lose it, potentially costing the game.

There are 2 campaigns. The first you play as the Allies, while in the second you play as Germany. The levels and bosses are the same, though the Germans most often start on the other side of the map and have a much more challenging set up which usually requires heavier use of direct control to win. There is also a kind of score attack level, which I did not find to be fun because of a cheap enemy train that can easily destroy your turrets, and a versus multiplayer mode which I did not play.

Excellent gameplay which seamlessly combines multiple genres make this game stand out, while the highly scripted nature of the levels does not give much incentive to play them again.

Pro

• Can control turrets and units
• Good balance between the various units and structures
• Your unit AI is fairly good
• Destructible environment
• Great variety of gameplay
• Multiplayer mode

Con

• Tutorial is not very good; especially does not teach how to control units very well
• Vehicles are destroyed if you stop controlling them. Makes it tedious to try and drive one while also keeping an eye on the base
• No way to send units out on objectives without controlling them. Your infantry are only present at the beginning and are worthless
• Game does not describe what campaign+ is. Instead of campaign and campaign+, they should have been Allied and German respectively
• Boss fights are very hard if you do not know what to do to prepare, and the bosses have absurdly high health
• No saving during missions
• Limited replayability as there is no randomization