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Toy Soldiers

Toy Soldiers

Believe it or not, but once upon a time there were no video games. People had to play with toys, like tin soldiers, instead. in Toy Soldiers the two meet.

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At a more basic level, Toy Soldiers is a pretty simple game. It's a very polished version of the classic Tower Defense-genre, with a lot more polygons. Usually, we only see this genre represented in Flash-games or home made mods.

So, Toy Soldiers is about defending a "tower", in this case a toy box, from waves of enemies. If too many of them manage to make their way into the box, it's game over. To stop the evil forces to conquer your toy box, you have to construct a defense force through the use of towers, cannons, gatling guns, mortars, gas troopers, howitzers etcetera. There is a limited amount of strategic points to place them on and in the later levels the enemies have set up shop on some of them.

All war materials you build cost money, money you get by killing incoming enemies. While you try to kill as many of them as you can, the enemies constantly change tactics and you have to adapt accordingly. Air defenses against airplanes, gas against soldiers, grenades against tanks and so forth.

Toy Soldiers then add a twist to the tried and tested Tower Defense-formula by letting you take direct control of all your troops - well, almost, since the poor infantry soldiers get to act as cannon fodder. You get control defense positions such as flame throwers and miniguns, but there is also a good portion of vehicles like tanks to drive and airplanes to fly. The different levels become an intensive mix of all of these different components, where you quickly have to speed around the map, build your defenses and then jump into a war machine when the AI isn't up to speed.

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Toy Soldiers is all about the first World War through the eyes of tin soldiers. There's no blood, but still a lot of brutal action with infantry torn to pieces, trenches, barbed wire and a lot of mud. The soldiers are torn into blocky pieces and that rains over the battlefield; tanks, forests and cities are all destroyed as the war rages, helped by the good and nicely balanced physics engine that the game runs on. All of this to charming, but at the same time quite tedious, music and trumpets.

Because Toy Soldiers is such a gritty and violent game, it's easy to become a bit shocked when you realize that the diorama the toy soldiers are fighting over is placed in a child's room. You're playing as a kid, who in turn is playing war. A nice detail, a breaking of the fourth wall, that makes Toy Soldiers an even bigger game even if it's really all about small toys.

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08 Gamereactor UK
8 / 10
+
Approachable, dangerously addictive, new approach to old concept, madly intensive
-
Annoying music, a bit too pricey
overall score
is our network score. What's yours? The network score is the average of every country's score

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Toy Soldiers

REVIEW. Written by Petter Mårtensson

Believe it or not, but once upon a time there were no video games. People had to play with toys, like tin soldiers, instead. Shock!



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