Toy Commander

Do you remember the feeling when an ordinary child's room turned into a sprawling battlefield and, among the furniture, you waged war with little cars and airplanes? It was exactly this fantasy that came alive in Toy Commander, one of the first titles that accompanied the European and American launch of the SEGA Dreamcast in 1999. The game put you in the role of a commander of an army of toys whose battles play out inside an ordinary house, enlarged to giant proportions.

The magic of Toy Commander lies in its variety. You control a whole palette of toys - racing cars, tanks, helicopters, and airplanes - and each behaves completely differently. In one mission you tear across the kitchen table, in the next you fly through the bedroom and shoot at enemy contraptions. The game thus mixes racing, flying, and action combat into a single package, with the domestic environment serving as an ingeniously designed three-dimensional arena full of ordinary objects elevated into gameplay elements.

Behind the game stood the French studio No Cliché, which created under the wing of SEGA Europe and specialized precisely in ambitious Dreamcast projects. Toy Commander was proof of how varied a library SEGA wanted to build for its new console - alongside the big arcade brands, original, creative ideas from European developers, which had no equal elsewhere, also got their space.

Conceptually, the game belongs to the long tradition of stories where toys come alive, and in the gaming medium it represents a distinctive contribution to this theme. The premise of a miniature war on the human scale of a household gives designers the chance to play with perspective and scale in a way that is fun in its own right - an ordinary staircase turns into a mountain pass and a kitchen counter into a fortified stronghold.

As a Dreamcast launch title, Toy Commander carried on its shoulders the task of showing what the new console could do, and it did so with infectious playfulness. Today it ranks among those Dreamcast titles that remind us how bold and imaginative the offering of this prematurely discontinued console was - games that were not afraid to be idiosyncratic and to play with fresh ideas.

Why play: For a cute and imaginative war of toys in a giant house that combines racing, flying, and action and breathes with the creativity of the early Dreamcast.