Toy Soldiers Cold War Review
Set in the cold war era Toy Soldiers is a strategic tower defence game that puts you in the shoes of the American military ready to make a mess of the Russians... and that is exactly what you do!
At the menu, whilst getting ready to select a game mode, you are hit by an amazingly cool guitar dominating tune similar to that of the “Top Gun” anthem. This is a great tune that gets the blood pumping and ready for the war ahead. I also want the guitar tab!!!
If you didn't play the last Toy Soldiers or have not played it for a while then the training will get you straight back on track. It’s short, sweet and to the point. The controls are very simple and fluid like they were in the last Toy Soldiers, allowing you to think tactics and get on with defending your toy box at a decent pace without having to fiddle around.
Like the last game, the idea is to set defence towers down and stop the enemy from entering your toy box. You can upgrade, sell, repair and let the towers get on with the hard work, or you can take control of them separately to rack up huge points and money to gain the biggest rewards. You can take control of vehicles and this time they are battery operated, not wind up.
Usable Vehicles are tanks, helicopters and a fighter plane. My favourite is the apache helicopter because I can fly around shooting missiles and machine guns from the sky at a brilliant advantage point whilst looking at the wonderfully designed scenic maps situated in someone’s room (plus its fun). Like I said the vehicles are battery operated so when you see the life of the battery dying you will either have to collect batteries that are situated around the level both on the ground or up high above buildings, or let the battery die which obviously leads to the vehicle being un-useable and being put back onto the charge station.
New features added to the game are “turbo charged” and “barrage”. If you get a high kill streak you get turbo charged which is unlimited ammo and pure shelling until you stop killing, or if whilst in Turbo charged mode you carry on dominating the enemies and reach a x40 you get barrage.
Barrage is like a lottery and by that I mean that a selection of specialist abilities are cycled through and eventually stop on the given one. You then call in the ability using the “"Y"” button. Certain abilities allow you to take control such as Commando (A little Rambo style man who throws out some funny one liners and uses both a rocket launcher and a LMG) and an AC130 gunner. Others only allow you to select an area such as Nuke, Bombing run and Artillery Barrage and then the computer does the dirty work leaving you to concentrate on the mission.
This time there are no gold cubes to collect (Woo Hoo!) but instead you have two objectives to achieve which if completed give you medals/decorations.
There are boss encounters like the last which I will not ruin for you but as you can expect they are huge and tough especially on the harder difficulties.
There is a lot of re playability and not just because of the collecting of medals, leaderboard scores, mini games, versus mode and survival mode but because the campaign, survival and versus mode can be played online or locally.
A few things that annoyed me were medal collecting, music silence and the camera. When going back and trying to get the remainder of the medals sometimes it was not obvious what I needed to do, or it was obvious but I could not do it e.g. I needed to get 50 assists on a certain level so off I went hurting enemies but not killing them and then letting another tower kill them off but no assists were coming up. I then tried co op with 2 controllers and again nothing. It had to be pointed out to me that certain weapons had to be used and that the objective needed to be completed in co op mode. This annoyed me because I had wasted about two hours trying to work it out when it could have been clearly stated what needed to be done.
The music and sounds are great but at times they cut out and don’t come back for a few minutes and this really takes you out of the game. The camera is still a bit shoddy like it was in the last game by which I mean, I want to be on the ground looking out/forward but the angle is making me look at the ground and only slightly ahead. You have to mess around with the analogue hoping you eventually get it or you can zoom out and then back in, This is very annoying and must have been obvious during development but are easily forgiven due to the little time you have to worry and think about them.
I personally emailed and tweeted Signal Studios shortly after the release of the original Toy Soldiers and asked for a more up to date war era with helicopters and airplanes and they delivered this with force. The game is very well made and satisfying to play, it is a great improvement over the last and has more appeal to the masses. Don’t download the trial, go straight for the full game because it is totally worth the 1200 MSP and is guaranteed to give you hours of fun.
9/10
Review By Wicket2961
