While WW2's been the setting for many a popular game, for some reason, its earlier, and just as important cousin, WW1, has been mostly ignored. While we've been able to play through virtual recreations of the D-Day landings, there have been few games that have let you take part in the trench warfare of WW1 - especially on a console. But now, that's all changed, thanks to Toy Soldiers.
Tally ho!
Instead of letting you get down and dirty as an individual soldier, in the middle of the great war, Toy Soldiers instead is all about the bigger picture. Set on a tabletop board game, with all manner of authentic looking period posters hanging around it, and destructible scenery waiting to be snapped, it's up to you to defend your toybox, by placing defensive units in the limited number of emplacements you have available, against the enemy's attrition. If any soldiers sneak through, they'll gradually work away at your health, and if you let thirty units past, it's game over.
Luckily, rather than there being any strategy to your opposition's offensive, they'll simply throw wave after wave of enemies at you, who'll mostly follow the same attacking lines - which handily usually take them past several of your gun emplacements. Whether it's a platoon of soldiers, or a battalion of tanks, it's simply a question of whether the units you've chosen, in the places you've put them, can survive and defeat the enemy assault - and there's a handy bar at the top to tell you what's coming next, in case you decide you want to make any changes to your defenses.
By limiting the places where you can build your defensive emplacements (you usually have a choice of around five places to begin with, which may open up to a number closer to ten as you progress through the game) Toy Soldiers forces you to make intelligent choices about what you build. If there's no aeroplanes scheduled to be coming at you, you won't want to build an anti-aircraft gun, but if you've got three squads of soldiers coming over the next three turns, you may well want to think about building a few anti-infantry guns. And while you can afford to make a few mistakes on the earlier levels, when it comes to the later stages, you'll need to think hard and carefully about where you place each weapon, taking into account its health, effectiveness, and, most importantly, range.
The raised concrete parts are the only places you can build defensive outposts - and even then, you need to make sure that what you build isn't in the range of German guns.
Thankfully, everything's well labelled, and you won't need to be a military expert to know what each weapon does. With only six standard types of weaponry on offer, labelled up with descriptions such as anti-infantry, anti-air, or a mortar launcher, some basic knowledge of military terminology is probably required, but you'll soon work things out through trial and error.
Each unit can be upgraded, repaired, or even sold if you decide to make changes to your defensive line, but as with everything in Toy Soldiers, it's a case of managing everything well. You've got a limited amount of finances to buy new weapons, and repair or upgrade old ones, and with money only awarded for defeating enemy units, if you've made some rubbish choices, you'll be left more skint than Britain in an economic downturn.
It's a game that requires a fair amount of thought, but unfortunately, also a fair amount of speed. Rather than letting you rebuild your units inbetween waves, the enemy really are a constant threat, and you'll find yourself in a constant struggle to keep everything repaired, and balanced to take out the enemy. However, when you do manage it, it's also an incredibly rewarding game - after all, it was your strategic choices that brought about the victory, rather than just a game of chance.
But while the strategy part of the game's fine, Toy Soldiers features something of a double edged sword when it comes to letting you take control of your units for yourself. While you can choose to jump onto any gun emplacement you want, and take control, the AI will handle the shooting for you when you're not around. But if you want any air cover, or tanks on the ground, you'll need to drop down to those units, and take control of them yourself.
And while this is a great idea in theory, and it does occasionally work very well in practice, it's let down by the awkward controls. The flight controls, particularly, are awful, with your plane jumping all over the place, rather than the precision that you need. Tanks are, understandably, limited in where they can fire because of the shape of their barrel, and the hole it sticks through - but trying to position your tank on a lump, or bump in the ground, so you can get the elevation you need to hit an enemy emplacement is a bit frustrating.
Taken moments before we jerked through the air, forgot which way was down, and plummeted into the ground.
In terms of accessibility too, Toy Soldiers is disappointingly poor. The tutorial, especially, is less of a tutorial, and more of a sentence or two, that doesn't explain the basics of the gameplay at all, and instead leaves you floundering - especially if you have no experience with the genre. Enemies have health bars, but they're so tiny and insignificant, it's often hard to spot - and that's if you can see the enemies themselves. With grey colours against a grey background, it's often rather tricky to see the enemies in the first place - and with no map to help you locate them, and no arrows pointing you in the right direction, finding that last tank, or plane can be frustrating - especially when it flies into your toybox without you looking. And the German triplanes are red. Yet we still struggled to spot them. And without any way of telling what the enemy units are that have been built on the map - yet alone their level, and range, so you can tell if they'll be able to hit your newly built machine gun or not, the later levels, where the Germans already take up half of the emplacements, can be very frustrating.
Of equal annoyance are the boss units. Coming around every three missions, these hulking chunks of armour are nothing but intimidating, as the eerie music usually signals the end of your army, as they usually simply trundle across the map, and crush everything in their way. What's frustrating is that you actually need to know exactly what the bosses are like, where they're going to come from, and the weapons you'd be best suited to build to take them out if you want to beat them. And as you usually need to place, upgrade, and look after those units mid level, that knowledge can only usually be gained from playing the level, and failing to beat them the first time - which is nothing if not an exercise in frustration, and a cheap loss.
What's also frustrating is the price. With only twelve levels on offer (you'll get to play as the Germans when you finish the campaign, but you'll just be playing through the same levels as a different side), there doesn't seem enough to it to justify the £10, or 1200 point asking price. And while the game features a split-screen mode, which lets you take on a friend, or your partner, it doesn't feature a co-op mode - which, in a game like this, would have been a god send. And would also have earnt it an extra point.
If you're a fan of games that make your brain work, and you can cope with a few frustrating mechanics, then Toy Soldiers may well be worth the outlay - especially at the moment, where it's 800 points - or a much more reasonable £6.80, and the sort of price it should have been to begin with.
Format Reviewed: Xbox 360
