Toy Sol­diers by Sig­nal Studios

Toy Sol­diers is a tower defense game, although none of its pro­mo­tional mate­ri­als con­tain the words “tower” or “defense.” This was prob­a­bly a cal­cu­lated deci­sion, as the tower defense genre is over­crowded with copy­cat clones and mediocre me-toos. But for clas­si­fi­ca­tion pur­poses, Toy Sol­diers is tower defense. It’s also one of the good tower defense games, so fans of the genre will want to check it out (there are tower defense fans out there, right?).

Play­ers return to their days of youth spent lying on the bed­room floor, recon­struct­ing epic bat­tles with plas­tic toys strewn from wall to wall. This isn’t a real­is­tic war sim­u­la­tion. Instead, you’ll find car­toon­ish, exag­ger­ated sol­diers that explode into plas­tic bits and gigan­tic table lamps loom­ing over the bat­tle­field. Your goal on each map is to defend your toy box from wave after wave of oncom­ing troops and vehi­cles. To do so you build defenses at spe­cific build sites around the map. In order to build you have to be able to afford the con­struc­tion, and money is earned from every kill.

One fea­ture that sets Toy Sol­diers apart from other tower defense games is the abil­ity to take con­trol of any tow­ers and mow down the enemy on your own. You can zoom-in to the weapon’s point of view, use the left stick to aim and the right to fire. There are also oppor­tu­ni­ties to pilot pow­er­ful vehi­cles like bombers and super tanks. In this way the game is well-suited to both thought­ful, strate­gic gamers and those look­ing for a more action-packed expe­ri­ence. On the hard­est dif­fi­culty, though, your tow­ers won’t fire on their own — if any ene­mies are going to be defeated, it will only be at your hands. That means you have to con­stantly jump from tower to tower, and if you take a break to build some­thing, no bad guys are being killed. Good luck with that.

While Toy Sol­diers boasts impres­sive vis­tas and epic con­flicts, your arse­nal is pretty mea­ger. There are only six units at your dis­posal, mean­ing your strate­gic options are some­what lim­ited. I under­stand if the devel­oper was going for a more stream­lined, action-focused strat­egy game, but I could have used more vari­ety to work with.

Despite this minor gripe I found Toy Sol­diers to be quite enjoy­able and was always eager to see what the next level had in store. The maps are all var­ied and every few stages you’ll have to defeat an impres­sive, giant boss. There are spe­cific sec­ondary objec­tives on each map that encour­age you to try dif­fer­ent tech­niques you may not have thought of. For instance, you may be asked to save up a cer­tain amount of money or snipe a tar­get num­ber of soldiers.

Zoom­ing around the bat­tle­field is a breeze thanks to an optional bird’s-eye view and the abil­ity to speed up your cur­sor by hold­ing the left trig­ger. But while down in the bat­tle­field I found the fixed cam­era angle a lit­tle inad­e­quate at times. You can swing the cam­era around in 360 degrees and tilt it up and down — to a cer­tain degree. But I would have appre­ci­ated more con­trol to get a feel for my surroundings.

Toy Sol­diers includes a two-player ver­sus mode, playable locally in split screen or online. Here, each side sends waves of sol­diers at the oppo­nent with the Y but­ton — but they also have to build units in order to defend their toy box from the waves being sent by the oppo­nent. It’s a fun lit­tle diver­sion that will extend your Toy Sol­diers expe­ri­ence a short while after you’ve com­pleted the cam­paign (which will take you sev­eral hours on nor­mal difficulty).