I’ll apologize right now, this may not be the review that tickles your fancy and warms your hearts. I wasn’t a “normal” boy. I didn’t have millions of green and yellow toy soldiers to play with. I didn’t setup battle strategies and barricades of enemies to blow up with my tank. I had Ninja Turtles and the Technodrome. That is besides the point, sorry. The novelty of the ’80’s toy soldier was not an immediate selling point. I’m a sucker for tower defense (TD) games. All kinds. So, that is the most critical part I consider when playing Toy Soldiers: Cold War (TS:CW). And now, ‘ON WITH THE SHOW.’
Right off the bat, TS:CW really impressed me. You are greeted with a comprehensive and thorough tutorial. It explains controls, features, power-ups, selling, upgrades, tactics. The works. Considering how dynamic and various some TD games are, this is thankfully well appreciated. It can get confusing sometimes when you don’t know all the information. It is a huge deal when you do understand, but then there is just a lot of replay value. On the topic of, replay value, I’ll just say that the single player probably won’t get played again. After I completed it and got the decoration for the achievement, I was finished with it. There isn’t a lot of forgiveness or variety when completing some of the levels. But, more on that when the time comes.
When playing a war game, you expect certain noises. Rifling bullets, mortar explosions, anti-air barrage. All unique noises of a well-executed battle. TS:CW is no exception. Each machine gun turret sounds uniquely different. More importantly, the machine gun turret sounds different from the commando’s machine gun, which sounds different from the helicopter’s machine gun, which sounds different from the heavy tank’s machine gun. While this may have sounded elaborate and unnecessary, it really isn’t. When games are made, immersion should be one of their top focuses and audio plays a gigantic role in this. TS:CW does this very well with the intensity and dimension of each sound.
While on the topic of first impression audio and visual, TS:CW really does a fantastic job of sucking you in to the battlefield. The terrain is all based around what looks like the play area of a boy’s bedroom. You can see building blocks, and other such novelty items while defending your toy box. Interestingly enough though, most larger structures can be destroyed or knocked down. Just a sweet layer of icing on a graphically impressive cake. Visually, a lot of thought went into the movement and standby of TS:CW. IE: When your turrets are sitting idle, the soldiers at that turret may interact with each other. Nothing like an Easter egg, but they certainly don’t stand there with a boring grimace.
Unfortunately, there is a third characteristic that creates a quality game. And that is the actual gameplay itself. Seeing as TS:CW is classified as a TD game, I really expected a lot more out of it. I feel it should be more adequately called a “Stationary Third-Person Shooter” because the turrets aren’t effective unless you take control of them, which becomes increasingly more difficult when the shortcuts to activate and control them is glitchy. Now, I don’t feel like getting into the details of that, because it can be easily fixed with a patch. But, the gameplay style can’t. For me, TD games are classified by the towers being able to handle the enemies. Also, I feel like TD games allow for multiple strategies or configurations to complete the mission. That wasn’t the case for TS:CW in my experience. There are situations I can understand, machine guns will not take down a tank. That is a given. But, why won’t rockets kill infantry? What can they possibly be wearing to prevent a rocket death? I’m guessing it is Halo: Reach technology because those Spartans will never die from a rocket.
The mulitplayer was a decent experience. I decided to play the endless survival and a mini-game or two with my XBLA partner. The mini-games are a blast to try and out-score each other and just compete in a generally fun fashion. But, the endless survival was littered with latency issues and got very old after 30 mins. I didn’t care for it. The enemies got progressively harder, and it wasn’t an enjoyable experience. Just me. Others might enjoy the same pattern of waves continually after another, then just rinsing and repeating until they kill you because they are unkillable.
Score: 7.5/10
Toy Soldiers: Cold War was developed by Signal Studios and published by Microsoft Studios for Xbox 360 on August 17th. A copy of the game was provided to us by Signal Studios for reviewing purposes.
