Toy Soldiers: Cold War

Title: Toy Soldiers: Cold War
Platform Played On: Xbox 3
Release Date: August 17, 2011
Date Played: September 2011
Time Played: 6 hours
Completed (Y/N): Yes
Score: 5/5


Opinion:

Ever since Plants vs Zombies success the market has been flooded with hundreds of tower defense games, and very few of them are any good. Toy Soldiers: Cold War is one of those good ones.

I didn't play last years Toy Soldiers, which was set in the World War I era, but I did hear that it was great. With this second iteration which is set during the Rambo era I simply had to check out this series.

Split Screen

The setup is simple, you have 6 types of turrets (Machine Gun, Anti-Tank, Mortar, Artillery, Infantry slowing, and Anti-Air) and you have pre-set locations where you can build these turrets. Each turret can be upgraded 3 times to make it stronger and faster. Enemies come in waves and try to get into your toy box (your base).

Sounds pretty similar to other tower defense games right? Well this is where Toy Soldiers starts getting interesting. You can jump in to any of the turrets and control them manually, this serves a few purposes. One is that if you have a good kill-streak going you can get infinite ammo and then unlock a special ability, a C-130 (Call of Duty 4 style) or artillery or bombing run or even a nuke, and most notably you can unleash Rambo. Yep, you can summon and control Rambo, you control him from 3rd person over the shoulder perspective and he is dual wielding a rocket launcher and a machine gun and says lines from the movies.

In addition to turrets and kill-streaks you have battery powered units that can be used while the battery is charged, these range from tanks to helicopters to planes, and are extremely powerful and satisfying to use.

Toy Soldiers: Cold War has incredible visuals with very detailed backdrops and the animations/models are done extremely well, they truly look and behave like toy soldiers would. While playing you can see outside of the toybox that you are in and the intricate backdrops look like something straight out of Toy Story.

The game features split screen mode, and on a 47 inch wide screen this mode worked perfectly, and I must note that it is one of the very few split screens that I found easy to use and fun to play in (Toy Story 3 is another example I can think of), in most other games split screen is a cumbersome and at times frustrating experience. Not here, they did a really good job tweaking the field of view and designing the UI to make it feel natural. You can play either co-op or versus in split screen, great for couch co-op. 

Overall Toy Soldiers:Cold War has a fairly short campaign (4-5 hours or so), but each mission has mini achievement goals, and multiple difficulty levels to conquer. Co-op, and versus modes are a ton of fun and add hours and hours to the time you would spend in the campaign.

I feel that this is the best and most in depth tower defense game I have ever played, it has an incredible amount of variety and strategy, as well as really cool setting and stellar graphics. I would definitely recommend this game to everyone, even those that generally do not like tower defense games. Toy Soldiers is a ton of fun for anyone that likes action games, as you can just sit in a turret and at that point it becomes a 3rd person shooter.

Anti Air Turret