|
Imagine being in World War 1, mounting a turret preparing to fire at the faceless enemy about to charge for your position. Suddenly they send out a fleet of tanks. “BOOM” “BOOM” you look to your right and there are some of your fellow soldiers explode… into little plastic pieces. That’s right; I’m talking about Toy Soldiers, a brilliant XBLA title that mixes World War 1 style toys and Tower defence with a twist.
If you haven’t played a tower defence game, please come out from your rock. For those that have you should know how most work, you have a specific amount of funds that are able to be spent on building towers, earning more as you defeat opponents. Toy Soldiers differs from other tower defence games by letting you take control of the towers. Be it the Sniper tower, machine gun or mortar emplacement. Combine that with the ability to control tanks and planes you get a game that is much more hands on that other tower defence games and gives you much more to concentrate on.
Unlike a lot of tower defence games, the placement for the towers is very restrictive in Toy Soldiers with specific emplacements of two different sizes available to place different tower types. Placement at the beginning of a game is essential for both money and getting through the early stages.
This is where one of my biggest criticisms of the game comes out, a lot of the later levels require you to die and remember the enemy waves for you to get your tower placement right. It’s not a major issue but it can become frustrating knowing that from this point on you can’t do anything to win. My other major criticism of the game is the enemy AI; getting run over by a tank kills soldiers and horses, just them running into the tank will kill them. The problem with that is they don’t try to avoid the tank, you can park it in their way and they will run to their death into the tank. Small complaint but it shows that the units have a fairly set path.
Continuing on frustrations leads me to the loading times being painfully long, yes they do give some nice looking loading screens to pass the time but for what the game is and it’s limited scope the loading is just too long. Lucky then, that the game behind them is good, really good.
The visuals are the first thing that catches you attention; from the soldiers looking like Toys, the battlefield feeling like a diorama and the children’s bedroom look in the distance make this game stand out. A disappointment on the graphics front is that is the game has the “Vaseline” look, made famous by the glut of games released on the Unreal engine this generation. Once you complete the game you unlock a film grain effect that really suits the game and the WWI aesthetic carried throughout the game.
The sounds in the game are also fantastic and help to set up the feeling that you are on a battlefield. The whistling of mortars, the air sirens and the nice big bangs you get from the tanks firing create something awesome with a nice surround sound system. It all doesn’t sound real, as if they have exaggerated them like a cartoon. It really suits the game’s toy feel.
The pace you run at is a lot more sedated than other tower defence games, it works in the games favour by giving you enough time to jump into a tank or plane without the worry that you will be over run really quickly. I think the only annoyance about this is how slow the tanks move. Sometimes it is a great thing because you aren’t ready to take them on, but other times you feel as if you are waiting for the tanks to come round the corner and you can’t meet them with your tank because they are equally as slow.
Toy Soldiers is one of the better games I have played from XBLA, it achieves the goal it sets for itself, the feel of blowing toys up. All while letting you control the tanks and taking on the enemy head first. There is a lot of content here and for 1200 points this is a brilliant game with only a few flaws holding it back from the 5/5
|
Comments