Toy Soldiers

Mike Rohde, Executive Editor

March 4, 2010

Toy Soldiers released on XBLA yesterday and the people cheered. Major Nelson did his Major's Minute on it, complete with lying in the sand and playing with some old school toys, and several Xbox employees cheerfully tweeted their excitement for the game. The trailer sets the stage for Toy Soldiers: it's World War I, you have a diorama set up for the battlefield and you'll need strategy to place your units to defend. Plus, when the battle begins, you can dive right into the action to pull the trigger yourself instead of the AI doing it for you. Is Toy Soldiers worth the 1200 MS points?

After trying the demo and the full version, the recommendation is to start straight out with the fully unlocked version. The demo stops the action frequently and asks you to buy the full game, and while you can earn Achievements with the demo, they don't unlock until you spend some MS points. Here's something to get you salivating: if you want to see your avatar sporting a gas mask, well, let's just say that's an early unlockable in Toy Soldiers. Save yourself some aggravation and skip the demo and buy the game.

As you can tell from the trailers, the game is beautiful and rather unique. The gameplay flows and after quickly adjusting to the controls you can concentrate solely on unit placement, upgrades, repairs and shooting. There is more than plenty to do in Toy Soldiers. Air and ground are covered well. You control ground units such as machine gun nests, howitzers, mortars, anti-aircraft, different types of tanks; and of course you can take to the air with sopwith camels and bombers.

Toy Soldiers offers a somewhat lengthy campaign for a 1200 point game with several difficultly levels, 200 Achievement points that you can earn, in-game bonuses to go after, and a multiplayer aspect that will have you coming back for more.

You'll notice that each mission in the campaign becomes increasingly difficult with new unit types being constantly introduced. After you finish the campaign, you'll want to go back for seconds; cause you'll have the feeling that you can do much better after learning what the heck is going on out there.

There is much potential for the multiplayer game. My first match went pretty quick. I think both of us were still learning what it is we were supposed to do. When the match started, I immediately placed a few machine guns on the front lines. Then I noticed I could launch an aerial assault. So I did that. And it rocked. I found that I could take control of my planes and I flew it directly into my opponents toy box for the win. I don't think he knew what hit him. It was a crushing victory and I'll be going back for more.

Honestly, Toy Soldiers will be one of those games that you play the heck out of for a month or two and then it will get shelved after the novelty wears off. But during that month or two of playing, you'll definitely get your money's worth of fun.