Earlier this week I was fortunate enough to visit Signal Studios in Bothell, Washington and take a look at the next game in the Toy Soldiers’ franchise, Toy Soldiers: Cold War.
In case you’ve never heard of Toy Soldiers, the original is a tower defense game where the player can take control of their units defeat their enemies, which debuted on XBLA early last year. Cold War is the ‘80s-era sequel to the original and features everything from the previous game, in addition to a variety of new features, like cooperative and mini-game modes.
I sat down with lead artist, Nick Vigna, and spent some time with the game.
The first thing that I noticed is how much the controls have been refined for Cold War, making the gameplay even more frantic and fast-paced. Any issues that I had with the controls in the first game have been fixed and then refined even further, as is the case with the plane controls that were very difficult to use in the original.
Another major improvement is the addition of a checkpoint system, mainly because the first game didn’t have one. Once you died in Toy Soldiers, you restarted the level completely, but the newly implemented checkpoint system called “wave rewind”, allows the player to rewind to their exact state on any previous wave with the touch of a button.
Fans of the game will notice that there’s a new engine made specifically for Cold War. This makes for greater fidelity in vehicle controls, a much discussed issue in the first game, and improved physics, opening the door for a new destruction system. Buildings are destructible now, making it easy to level those that get in your way. Cold War also introduces new vehicles including Apache helicopters, ATVs, and F-14 fighter jets. The addition of these new vehicles bring the caveat of battery life along with them, as players will need to grab either batteries or charging pads before their vehicle runs out of power.
Cooperative gameplay is accomplished using vertical split-screen, which surprisingly doesn’t make each player’s view feel cramped. While technically players are working cooperatively to defend the toybox, there is also a certain level of competitiveness to the gameplay. At the end of each match, the two players’ scores are added together into one that will be sent to the leaderboards. The game also keeps track of who does what, displaying statistics for who pulled off the most kills, vehicle kills, headshots, etc. making for great friendly competition.
Perhaps two the greatest new additions to Toy Soldiers: Cold War is the inclusion of mini-games and barrages.
Mini-games turn components of the main game into short, competitive challenges, such as seeing how many flies can be killed in 60 seconds from the turret of a machine gun emplacement. After the mini-game is completed, the score can be uploaded to the server or with the press of a button, the player can retry the challenge for a better score.
With barrages, a red star will randomly appear over the head of an enemy. if the player kills the enemy before the red star disappears, they will earn one of the random barrages for 30 seconds such as the Commando, air-strike, and the AC-130. The commando is essentially Rambo, and is a player controlled character that runs around the map dual-wielding a machine gun and grenade launcher.
In addition to the previously-mentioned content, there were two other cooperative modes as well. Survival mode is essentially the classic tower defense game, sans the whole winning part. Players must fight off wave after wave of enemies that increase in difficulty with each turn. It isn’t a matter of how many waves until you beat the game; it is a matter of how many waves until the game beats you. There is an infinite amount of waves as at a certain point; they will eventually take over your toybox no matter how good you are.
The second survival mode is Lockdown, which is in essence, the exact same game as survival, but each emplacement spot must be purchased independently of the unit. Each time that one of these emplacements is purchased, the remaining emplacements double in price.
The final cooperative mode is Hardcore, which adds two new rules: vehicles can only be used once during a match and units cannot be repaired.
With everything accounted for, Toy Soldiers: Cold War is a huge improvement over the already great core material. Signal Studios really listened to the complaints that fans had about the first game and rebuilt the entire game in order to make the necessary improvements. The new game modes and cooperative play make it easily approachable to those who may have been turned off by the difficulty of the original.
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