I have a penchant for little toys going to war. Anyone who has played the ‘Mean Greens’ will know what I’m talking about, the “cartoonisation” of army troops and leaders screaming at the top of their lungs in tiny toy-forms until scores of them explode and make funny sounds on the way out. Now developer Kraken Empire and publisher Joystick Ventures have done just that sort of thing… but with minifigs in the guise of legionnaires, samurai, medieval, and what-have-you! Welcome to ‘Toy Tactics’, a real-time strategy game where players divide up their troops, mix and match leaders, and conquer stages against the deadly Draugr in this deceptively simple yet engaging strategy title.
It’s All in the Toys
Toy Tactics has players command multiple armies across a series of campaigns in its main single player mode. The Draugr are wreaking havoc across the land and, when all hope seems lost, a mysterious being who goes by the name Sun Tzu shows up and offers a helping hand. Well, he’s guiding you, more like, but leading troops to victory isn’t difficult—you just need a paintbrush and a good head on your shoulders. See, players command their units by drawing formations with a paintbrush tool. When you combine these formations together, they can be dragged as one unit, allowing you to get some extra flexibility on how your troops engage baddies. Along with that, depending on the combined leader units and regular troops, the leader units will get special abilities that can be incredibly useful against strong enemies. Sun Tzu also has a nice voice, too!
An important thing to note is that Toy Tactics is very much driven by physics. As in, environments contain destructible materials that can collapse and create paths (or ruin perfectly good ones!). You can use skills that you unlock to create barriers that dynamically drop onto the battlefield based on the size of the paintbrush stroke, which can either help or really harm your case. And as units come across obstacles, they’ll do their best to tear ’em down or jump around to get to their destination. Environments themselves are rarely flat plains, with plenty of hills and mountainsides to scale, not to mention environmental traps that’ll send you and your troops flying if you’re not paying attention.
And it’s as shrimple as that. Toy Tactics is all about how you place your units, their formations, and combining the right teams to wipe out the scores of enemies the game will spawn. Stages have varied objectives (both main and side ones) and, combined with excellent level design, makes nearly all of them very fun to play. They don’t waste your time either, per se, as they’re all quite short—but you’ll likely need run through them multiple times as Toy Tactics is very happy to surprise you with ambushes when you least expect them.
Oh, and it plays like a breeze across both mouse and keyboard and gamepads. I was surprised about the latter actually as usually, I don’t find top-down cameras to work very well with controllers, but I had a much better time that I thought I would without my mouse. All though, I did manage to make some fatal missclicks, no thanks to muscle memory…
The other is praying the AI doesn’t fall off a cliff. (Kraken Empire/Joystick Ventures)
But I’ll be honest, Toy Tactics has two things I don’t like about it. Though to be fair, the first issue I have with it is the part I do like about the game: physics rules all in Toy Tactics and even though you might be leading your troops to victory, all it takes is for a scaffolding to collapse to wipe out your entire empire. Seriously, I watched it happen (multiple times) and I was not pleased one bit. Units are pretty good at navigating complex terrain, but even they will fall to their deaths due to unfortunate stroke placement and broken up trees. The dynamic nature of the game means that restarts will inevitably occur just because of the whims of fate, so keep that in mind as you play with your minifigures. Units are pretty good at navigating complex terrain, but even they will fall to their deaths due to unfortunate stroke placement and broken up trees.
The second issue is a little more annoying. Toy Tactics is technically a “slow” game. Even though the stages are generally small and the objectives are clearly marked, you’ll be reaching for the fast-forward button every chance you get. Units walk excruciatingly slow and if you do let a stage play out without ever speeding up the game, they’ll easily soak up 10 to 15 minutes of your time. And that’s assuming everything well according to plan. I’ve always viewed speed controls in strategy games as a way to progress to the next beat of the campaign since the player knows what will happen in the interim and because they’re comfortable with the default speed of the game. If Toy Tactics could get a speed bump down the line, that would be very much appreciated.
Beyond that, if you get stumped playing the main campaign, you can always jump into another game mode. There are a couple options: we have skirmish mode, which pits you into specific scenarios against the AI. Puzzle mode gives you a number of units on a flat map and tests you to survive with the best possible time. Sandbox mode lets you set up hundreds if not thousands of random units so you can watch them slaughter one another. And then there is multiplayer with either a friend or a quick 1v1 match.
Toy Tactics is deceptively simple yet a lot of fun. It’s got the charm of toys clashing about as environments, spells, and the right tactics change the course of the game. And all the while offering varied objectives, great level design, and quite a number of modes for play. If you’re in the market for a unique real-time strategy game, look no further than Kraken Empire’s latest hotness. ∎
Toy Tactics
Played on
Windows 11 PC
PROS
- Simple yet fun-to-play RTS gameplay.
- Strong level design and varied objectives.
- Lots of game modes to choose from.
- Amusing narrative.
CONS
- The physics-based nature of the game can make for some frustrating plays, compounded by AI pathfinding gaffes.
- Over-reliant on fast-forwarding.
