Review: Toy Soldiers: Boot Camp
Score:
30%
The Toy Soldiers game on the Xbox 360 just got itself a companion application. Boot Camp will talk with the larger game, sharing high scores and data from the mini games that are in both the 360 and the Windows Phone version. It's cute, it works, but I don't think many people will be buying it.
Version Reviewed: 1.0.0.0
Buy Link | Download / Information Link
While you can play this as a standalone game, it's actually quite a poor offering. You have three mini games to choose from, where you control your Toy Soldiers in 'thrilling' combat games around your house.
The first mini game, which is the one that comes in the free trial, is probably the best of the bunch. A model nuclear war is underway, with cardboard mushroom clouds, bombers, and ballistic missiles passing in front of your missile launcher. Fire off a missile, get a missile camera view to help you steer the missile while in flight, and take them out.
You have a fire and speed control on one side of the screen, while the direction control can be either the tilt sensors, a sweep of your finger anywhere on the screen (my favourite option), or a virtual stick to make your steering inputs.
While it's the best of the mini-games, that's not saying much. It gets repetitive very quickly, and once you have your eye zeroed in to lead the moving targets by the right amount, the challenge is over, leaving just a grind for points. Which is not very fun.
The second game, Fly Swatter, takes an almost identical control system, but with a machine gun instead of a missile launcher. That means you lose the missile viewpoint, replaced with a simple gun-sight that you need to put over the flies who are darting around the room. It's such a basic formula (move the cursor around while firing a gun with infinite ammo) you'd hope something new was added to keep it interesting.
All I can see is that some flies are golden, and get you more points. Hold back my excitement.
Finally you have Thread the Needle. You're back in the missile steering territory here, as you control the speed of the missile as it flies down a corridor, with the direction controls needed to avoid the spinning blades that will call a halt to the end of your game.
It's a nice graphical demo - actually all the graphics in Toy Soldiers are pretty smart, with a nice solid feel to the toys, but Thread the Needle does veer a bit into Tron like territory, and when in the pipe loses that Toy Soldiers feel that the other two games and the menu system have. It feels out of place, and needs a lot more responsiveness to be enjoyable as a game.
And that's what is lacking for me in Boot Camp. Enjoyment. Everything felt like a slog, and I was only doing it to please the designers because there was no real point to anything. I know that sounds a lot like a real Boot Camp, but that's not what I expect to find in a game for my leisure time.
Is there any value in these games if you have Toy Soldiers? I'm not sure, given that I don't own the full sized companion game. Perhaps rather than trying to make a quick sale on the brand name, Microsoft should have bundled this title with the Xbox 360 game and not filled up the Marketplace with what can charitably be called filler, or could be seen as a more cynical grab for cash.
Ask me right now, and it feels more like the latter, and I don't want to see that in the Marketplace.
Toy Soldiers Boot Camp. I have to review it so you don't have to play it. Now I get to fall out and resume normal duties... And smile for the first time in writing this review.
Reviewed by Ewan Spence at