Toy Soldiers

Toy Soldiers is a strategy game combining tower defense with a gunner shooter, created by studio Signal Studios and published by Microsoft Game Studios in 2010 on Xbox Live Arcade. The game sets World War I battles in a stylized child's bedroom, where soldiers, tanks, and planes look like living tin and plastic toys arranged on a diorama resembling a miniature battlefield full of trenches, barbed wire obstacles, and model hills. The player builds and upgrades defensive positions along the routes taken by advancing waves of enemy infantry, armored vehicles, and aircraft.

The key mechanic is the ability to take direct control of any of your own weapons at any time — whether a machine gun, an artillery position, or a fighter plane — and personally intervene in the battle instead of merely watching the automated defense. This combination of strategic placement and first- or third-person action gives the game a pace unusual for classic tower defense titles and forces the player to constantly switch between planning and direct action. Visually and aurally the game deliberately contrasts a playful, toy-like aesthetic with the serious historical backdrop of World War I, creating a distinctive, lightly ironic atmosphere.

Toy Soldiers was received very positively by critics at release, especially for its original genre mashup and inventive visual stylization, and became one of the most successful Xbox Live Arcade titles of that year. Its success led to the release of expansions as well as a standalone sequel, Toy Soldiers: Cold War, set during the Cold War. Today the game is valued as an example of a cleverly combined genre hybrid that managed to appeal to fans of both strategy and action shooters at once, and as an inventive example of how to treat a serious historical topic with a light artistic touch.

Why play it: Thanks to its original blend of strategy and action shooting in an inventive visual style, it offers a clever genre hybrid that will appeal to fans of both styles as well as those who enjoy lightly presented historical themes.