Review Score:

War doesn’t have to be violent

When I was a child I didn’t play with army figures and I didn’t re-act famous war battles. I didn’t play with Barbie either but that didn’t stop me turning out batting for the other side and wearing a dress or two. In fact, my childhood was actually all about Wacky Races, Tom & Jerry and the Atari ST. I grew up on the likes of Stunt Car Racer and Impossible Mission. I never found Action Man at all interesting either. I feel a lot of this boils down to the fact that the interaction was never immersive enough, you needed the ability to make believe and as far as I got with that was pretending to be a pro BMX rider, pedalling to the metal through woodlands with my mates. However, Signal Studios has brought the toy chest to life and in some way’s I’m kind of gutted that I never got to forge battles on my living room floor, because I never knew it could be this much fun.

Yes, you can control this too

Toy Soldiers is set around WWI and the premise is the game is similar to that of tower defence games. Build weapon units and kill your enemies before they enter your base. For every enemy you kill or infrastructure you destroy, you get cash. The cash can then be re-invested into upgrading or adding to your defence in form of mortars, machine guns, mustard gas, flamethrowers, the list goes on. Each weapon has the ability to be upgraded and this will become essential as you face waves of Krauts with better armour or armoured steel tanks. You can also lay down barbwire to slow your enemies down. This is a clever move as it’ll also move your foes into different directions making the tactical element even more absorbing. As the single player campaign progresses you’ll have to sell units and be clever with tooling up the right weapons for the job, this increment on skill really starts to take place from Level 3 onwards. Fortunately each level has its own themed battle grounds, from war torn trenches to battles taking place in forests, the variety is both visually appealing and much welcomed. So, this sounds like a standard tower defence styled game but you would be wrong to think that. Signal Studios have thrown in a USP to this game like no other, every unit in this game you can step in and remotely control and this is just an act of pure brilliance. Whether it’s lining up your trajectory for mortars, flying a Red Baron to bomb the enemy or acting as a sniper on your lookout tower the game has an unbelievable charm that works incredibly well.

Being a console game you may be slightly sceptical about how they’ve mapped the controls, but even that is easy. Pressing A on each character or weapon unit will enable you to jump in and take control of your men with ease with the sub-options of upgrading and selling your units tiered into a circular selection system. Just firing blistering rounds of ammunition from an artillery gun is particularly satisfying. One of our favourite moments in the game were taking down the Zeppelin blimps and having dog-fights in Red Barons. Having the freedom to switch between all of these different combat options means that the game never gets stale and because everything takes place on a small based arena, there is no chance of ever getting lost, which is something that can happen so easily on the Battle Station series.

Control the infantry too!

The visuals in the game are satisfying, Signal have added in quirky visual effects such as film grain to introduce levels and the muddy and painted styled landscapes give the feeling that you are playing directly from a vintage battle ground. All soldiers are faithfully re-created in wood apparel, so there is no nasty green Army Men tackiness to be seen. Damage effects are nice, but don’t expect any physics based explosion effects. It would have been nice to have something like the PhysX engine used, but we can understand why it hasn’t, after all it’s not exactly needed, the game doesn’t try to be super realistic. You’ll really find yourself immersed in the battle in Toy Soldiers and that is partly because of the fantastic sound effects and also down to the music that features in the game, licensed tracks such as Goodbye, Dolly Gray and She has seen better days create nostalgic ambience. Someone pass me a back of senior service. Couple this with the early century graphics and typography and you have yourself a very authentic looking defence game that quite simply floors any competition on the system, all of a sudden games like Defence Grid and South Park Tower Defence rub off distinctly average.

The fun doesn’t end on the single player campaign, if you ever needed any more reasonable argument to justify the 1200 Microsoft point investment then look no further than the multiplayer. Not only do you get split-screen support where you can play the same modes as the online, you obviously get to play over Live too. Toy Soldiers multiplayer works on an attack and defend game type. Protect your base and attack your opponents, you’re rewarded for infiltrating their base as much as possible. Whilst online doesn’t offer variety in game modes, there is simply no need for it too. There is no learning process involved and with the single player maps, converted to the multiplayer you’ll have plenty of battle grounds to give you more wood splinters than you can shake a stick at. In addition to the multiplayer there are ration packs that can be collected by completing a goal within a level, such as performing 10x multipliers on a particular weapon. You’ll also be able to browse through all the weapon sets you have unlocked in a gallery mode.

Toy Soldiers is a piece of accomplished work, it’s gone above and beyond it’s remit and created a game that will sit on XBLA as one of the best games it has ever churned out. If we were to make a really anal criticism then we’d have like to have seen the hit detection be a little crisper, but with that aside it’s an absolute diamond, a bobby dazzler and should stand on your purchase list as tall as the Empire State building. Microsoft were not joking about their Block Party line up, Toy Soldiers opens the four week megaton with a game with original relish and fun in its droves.