[Console Games] Toy Soldiers HD Review: The Best Tower Defense Game On Console

[Douma]

Tower defense games are few and far between on console (or at least half-decent ones). It's kind of telling that an HD remaster of a decade-old game is about the best we've got here in the year 2023. To be fair, we're coming in a touch late on this review, as Toy Soldiers HD actually released a couple of years ago for PS4 and Xbox One. But, given that the Switch version dropped in without any kind of promotional fanfare on December 31, 2022, I'm digging into the toy box, pulling out the plastic figures, and giving this family-friendly war game a shot.

So, what's it all about? Not to be confused with the similarly named cult-classic 90s movie, Small Soldiers, Signal Studios' Toy Soldiers HD is a remaster of the 2010 original game. Which (and this is me being a proper nitpicking arse here) was actually already HD, by the legal definition of HD. If I've got complaints about the game, it's mainly in the naming than the actual gameplay, though with that said I have put enough hours into Toy Soldiers HD to come away with a few select grievances, but more on them later.

Toy Soldiers HD is a tower defense game that uses the first world war - also known as "The Great War" - as its backdrop. But instead of going for a realistic approach with scattered limbs and spine-chilling death cries, the entire thing is presented as a tabletop game that uses little plastic figurines instead of blood-filled meat sacks. It makes for a cleaner game that can be enjoyed by the whole family, though I'd perhaps suggest leaving the younger players in the reserves for this one - it is, after all, still a game about war and death, even if it lacks the actual horrors of war.

Your job is to defend your toybox, or as is the case in some of the later levels, toy boxes, from the enemy army. The battlefield, laid out over kitchen tables and bedroom desks, has a number of set locations for your various tools of war, ranging from machine guns to mortars to flamethrowers and gas emplacements. Yeah, it's a bit grim if you take more than a few seconds to think about it all, but it's a fair depiction of the tools of the time, so credit to the developer for sticking to its guns (and *ahem* gasses) in the name of historical accuracy.

The big twist with Toy Soldiers HD is that, unlike in most tower defense games, you can take control of your placed units and get stuck into the battle yourself. The benefit here is that you have free control of where your deadly bullets end up, and as the game employs a kills=cash system with multipliers for particularly deadly bursts of murder, you can put a few pennies in the piggy bank early on, giving you the chance to either buy extra defenses or get a few early upgrades.

https://www.dualshockers.com/toy-soldiers-hd-review/