REVIEW : Toy Soldiers: HD (PC)
When a remaster of a game that was initially in HD gets suffixed with “HD,” it irritates me a little. That reveals nothing to me. Toy Soldiers HD is especially unusual and perplexing to me because we got Toy Soldiers Complete in 2016, which was a combo of Toy Soldiers and Toy Soldiers: Cold War. So I wasn’t sure what to expect from this remaster coming in. Was it going to be any different? Were there any changes made? It’s a bit of a trade-off, but Toy Soldiers HD stands out enough to justify its presence when it comes down to it.
The employment of 19th-century techniques with modern 20th-century technology was a key concern. Everyone got their new toys out and was trying to figure out how to utilise them as fast as possible. As a result, the combat was sluggish, and everyone on the western front waited in mud, waiting for their turn to rush through razor wire against machine guns and artillery. This might explain why Toy Soldiers HD chose to employ small dioramas to illustrate the war’s heinous tragedies. Because it’s considerably less traumatic to see someone melt beneath the heat of a flame thrower when they’re made of metal. Toy Soldiers HD is a tower defence game if you’re new with the series. You have one or more entries to the toy box. Unless you’re taking on the role of the Huns. To do this, you’ll need the greatest equipment available during WWI: artillery, mortars, machine guns, flak, and chemical weapons. Some missions also equip you with tanks and planes, allowing you to enter the front lines.
Waves of foes form a line to attack your boys. The plan is to foresee what will happen next and prepare for it. Artillery can damage attackers from afar, but groups of adversaries can occasionally slip through the cracks. Machine guns are largely ineffective against vehicles, although they are critical for cavalry. When it comes to vehicles, mortars are your best choice, but you’ll need to lay them down thick and improve them if you want to stop the Kaiser’s lads in their tracks.
Every kill earns you money, and if you wade in and take charge of your implements yourself, you can earn extra. Combos may be created by striking groups of foes with a single shell or mowing them down in rapid succession. It’s critical to plan where and when you’ll spend your money. While it may be tempting to raise your weapons to the top, a swarm of planes might be your undoing. Toy Soldiers HD includes the main game’s stages as well as the DLC The Kaiser’s Battle and Invasion! That would be the bare minimum of what you’d expect, but six more levels have been added as bonuses to sweeten the sale.
Is there anything unique about Toy Soldiers HD? Yes, in fact. From a technical sense, the aesthetics have been redone, but more significantly, all of the levels have been examined and reworked. This entails both rearranging placement points and overhauling the landscape. Mostly. Some levels appear to be the same to me, but others appear to be much more detailed. It has also been rebalanced. There are small and large emplacement pads, and the huge ones could only hold one large or tiny weapon earlier. You may now cram four weapons onto one of the bigger foundations, allowing you to be more versatile with your strategy. Are you a skeptic of artillery? When you’re ready, just drown them in mortar shells.
The ability to drop general-use barrages on enemies is another new feature. This is a characteristic of the Cold War, but there’s just one form of barrage here, and it’s OK. It pours artillery down on any adversaries on the board, occasionally hitting them. You’re frequently given extra tanks and planes. Given that they are typically single-use vehicles, having a spare is advantageous if Archie grounds your plane when you aren’t aware that he is even around. It also helps you to be more versatile in your use of them. You can use them when you need more help or when you’re just bored with the AI’s handling of your emplacements and want to have some fun.
You can also man different unique structures and vehicles that may already be spread over the fight zone on top of the basics. It’s a lot of fun to click on odd items and see what they’re capable of, whether you’re picking out soldiers with a sniper’s tower or bombing things with a biplane. You may also enhance your structures, and one area that you’ll have to keep an eye on is repairs, because the enemy force will do everything they can to make all of your hard work go to waste. I suppose that isn’t the worst thing the Germans have ever done.Juggling all of these factors while deploying a strategically positioned array of buildings is a lot of fun, and this formula works well in the local setting.
Each weapon has its own set of advantages and disadvantages. The Howitzer has a vast range and does a lot of damage, but it’s useless up close. Anti-aircraft weapons are particularly efficient against enemy air forces, but they offer limited protection against other threats. Anti-Infantry guns are undoubtedly your most important weapon, since they are incredibly powerful against foot soldiers and have a 360-degree range of fire, while being ineffectual against armour before being improved. Mortars may be used against infantry and tanks and do great damage, but have an extremely restricted range; vehicles like as tanks and aeroplanes are available in scarce quantity, with the tanks moving sluggish but being strong, and the aeroplanes capable of dropping bombs and partaking in dog fights. In addition, sniper
There are various disadvantages. Co-op was not included in this edition, as it was in Toy Soldiers: Cold War and Toy Soldiers Complete. Instead, you get combative multiplayer, which is enjoyable, but the model appears to be more suited to co-op. It’s a pity it was forgotten. You can still gain rations for accomplishing special tasks in each stage for some reason, but you can’t see them. At the very least, I couldn’t discover a method, although I looked hard. Each ration contained a short description in the original form, which explained strange titles like Bully Beef and Hardtack. For some, it may not be a significant loss, but it does make earning the rations feel a little useless without it. There are a few apparent alterations, but nothing that is very energising. Toy Soldiers HD seems genuine to the original experience, unlike Toy Soldiers Complete, which tended to merely shove new elements into the old game where they didn’t necessarily suit. It’s an oddly comical view on a nightmare conflict, but it’s not one that completely disregards history. With the remaster, there was certainly more that could have been done. Toy Soldiers Cold War, for example, might have been packed alongside it.
