Windows Phone Xbox Live Review: Toy Soldiers: Boot Camp

Bespeak Studios' XBLA Toy Soldiers games provide an inspired twist on the tower defence force formula. The setting involves a disharmonize between two factions of army men, making for fun employ of calibration and nostalgia. The gameplay is unique because players not simply purchase turrets to thwart incoming waves of attackers; they really get to take control of said turrets and other vehicles, infusing the strategy with some much-appreciated action. The most contempo entry, Toy Soldiers: Cold War also introduced a variety of minigames to continue players entertained between entrada missions. Now Krome Studios has shrunk some of those pint-sized minigames downwards into an even more compact package in Toy Soldiers: Boot Military camp for Windows Phone.

A trio of diversions

While Cold State of war independent six unlike minigames, only three of those made the trip to Kick Camp: Flyswatter, Cardboard Theater, and Flyswatter.

Flyswatter

A swarm of flies take invaded a chaotic desk. Information technology's up to the player to shoot them downward with a rapid-fire turret. You get score bonuses for clearing whole waves of bugs, shooting them down quickly, and taking out golden flies. Not only do gold flies explode when downed, taking out nearby insects, they besides destroy any other golden flies on screen.

Flyswatter is easily the best of Kick Campsite's minigames. Information technology looks peachy, with numerous huge, detailed flies whizzing near. Most importantly, it'due south easy to command. You only aim and shoot, with zippo else to worry well-nigh; the turret never overheats or annihilation similar that. Plus we tin can all hold that flies are complete jerks and deserve whatever penalty they become.

Cardboard Theater

While this one is a shooting gallery likewise, it plays quite differently from Flyswatter. Here you're firing at automatic paper-thin targets rather than nasty insects. Each kind of target is worth a dissimilar number of points, with the smaller and faster ones giving larger rewards.

Instead of a machine gun, players control a rocket launcher. You tin can either fire and forget or manually steer the rocket, adjusting its trajectory and speed as information technology zooms toward the cardboard city. The speed controls are overcomplicated as you lot have to manage a slider on top of watching where the rocket is going. This ane is decent on Windows Phone, but worked improve on consoles.

Thread the Needle

Cold War's worst minigame also happens to be the worst in Boot Military camp.  Here y'all steer a rocket down a tube, trying to fly through as many spinning rings as possible before crashing. The best strategy involves staying near the eye and dodging the oncoming barriers every bit necessary. This one was no fun on the Xbox 360, and it's even less and so while having to manage a speed slider. I can merely assume it was chosen considering it'south very simple graphically and uses the same steering mechanics as Paper-thin Theater.

One pocket-sized package

None of these minigames takes very long to play – Flyswatter and Cardboard Theater each have a one minute timer, while Thread the Needle goes on until the player crashes (usually less than a minute). I wish the 2 fun minigames had been expanded to include longer games modes. Kick Camp doesn't accept a metagame tying everything together, then the only real goals are high scores and Achievements. Score-oriented games can work fine on mobile phones, but even still the bundle feels a chip bloodless. A few additional minigames would have provided a lot more than staying ability.

Control quirks

Boot Camp offers iii different control types: swipe, tilt, and d-pad. Players can also enable Southpaw, swapping the position of the on-screen buttons and/or d-pad, as well as Inverted aiming. All of these options tin be changed at any fourth dimension from the suspension card.

Unfortunately, none of the control options feels quite right. The default swipe controls are a bit too slow to be effective. Tilting works passingly well, just it doesn't recenter very well and just feels bad-mannered. For my money, d-pad is the best of the bunch, merely that'south not proverb much. The d-pad is far too small, making it hard to use without looking directly at it – your pollex will just end up straying from the pad. Plus it acts like a digital d-pad rather than analog, then fast aiming is out.

Kick Camp is still playable despite these bug, but it never approaches the playability of the panel version. The developers take expressed interest in fine-tuning the controls via an update; hopefully Microsoft is kind plenty to give it the become-ahead.

Large extras at least

Krome Studios previously ported the Game Room titles like Centipede and Pitfall! to Windows Phone. Those games all had global Leaderboards, whereas the vast majority of Windows Phone Xbox Live titles are limited to friends Leaderboards. Thankfully, Kick Camp got the Global Leaderboard handling too. For a game that's all near earning loftier scores and nothing else, the ability to compare your score with the world at large adds a lot.

Some other bonus that we seldom see in Windows Phone games: the power to take screenshots. At any indicate, whether navigating menus or during gameplay, you can ever take a screengrab by tapping the camera icon at the height-right corner of the screen. Screenshots salvage to your phone'due south Photograph binder, where they tin be shared like whatever other pic.

Finally, equally mentioned in our developer interview, owning Kicking Army camp is supposed to unlock a special feature or 2 in the Toy Soldiers: Common cold War DLC. Only one problem – the DLC was slated to come out months ago merely never materialized! As such, I can't say whether the connectivity will unlock anything of value. WPCentral will be sure to let you know whenever the console DLC and associated feature finally become a reality.

Achievements

Kick Camp'south Achievements are some of the easiest in recent memory. You can get them all in an hour, provided Thread the Needle and Cardboard Theater don't give you too much trouble. 3 are secret: picket the entire credits (yay), fire a missile into the fireplace in Paper-thin Theater (frustrating due to the controls), and shoot downwardly the bugzapper in Flyswatter.

Overall Impression

Toy Soldiers: Kicking Camp is quite a tease. It'due south fastened to an awesome Xbox 360 game that probably could accept been ported wholesale to Windows Phone with only a slight loss in fidelity. Indeed, the graphics hither do a fantastic job of capturing the looks and nostalgic 1980s atmosphere of the original, and yous've gotta dear the shared global Leaderboards. But instead of a substantial experience, we go a paltry three of the console version'due south minigames, one of which stinks like onions. Most important, none of these minigames lasts more than a minute – Zombies on the Phone this ain't. Accomplishment hunters volition surely beloved Boot Camp for its brevity, just that same plus will prove to be a minus to many other gamers.

Toy Soldiers: Boot Camp costs $2.99 and at that place is a free trial. Get information technology hither on the Market.

Source: https://www.windowscentral.com/windows-phone-xbox-live-review-toy-soldiers-boot-camp

Posted by: whitmannosty1997.blogspot.com

Share this post