Microsoft’s Block Party kicks off this Wednesday with Toy Soldiers. Toy Soldiers is a WWI themed action strategy game from Signal Studios. The game plays similar to tower defense. There are pre-made spaces where you can set up AA guns, mortars, anti-infantry machine guns, sniper towers, barbed wire obstacles-even entrenched units that spray enemies with poison gas. Once placed the AI takes over and your army prepares to attack and defend as best it can. Where Toy Soldiers really shines though is that at any point you can take control of any unit on the field. This takes the camera from the default bird’s eye view and moves it in closer, this makes the controls feel more like an action game. This allows you to man an anti-aircraft gun, gas enemy infantry, fire mortars, hop in a bi-plane and spit machine gun fire at troops, or engage in some first-person sniping.

The single player campaign offers up 24 missions. This is divided equally between playing as the British and German armies. Online will offer local two-player split-screen matches, head-to-head, attack-and-defend matches online, and leaderboards. Toy Soldiers already has a lot of talk behind it from it’s showing at recent gaming conventions and is looking like it is set to deliver. The game will be available this Wednesday, March 3, for 1200 MS Points.

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This year’s E3 was a smorgasbord of triple A sequels from quite a few big name publishers. I’m not saying this is a bad thing because I’m sure Modern Warfare 2 will kick ass but inevitably some good looking original IPs went less noticed than they should have. Darksiders falls into this catergory.

The story of Darksiders really peaked by interest when I first heard about it. You play as War, one of the four horseman of the apocalypse. As it turns out the apocalypse went down when it wasn’t supposed to and both Heaven and Hell are putting the blame on you (this isn’t your swine-flu zombie apocalypse or your “oops, we launched one too many nukes and accidentally killed everyone on earth” apocalypse, this is the true biblical apocalypse). With this story as the backdrop, you head on over to Earth to clear your name and figure out who really induced the apocalypse.

Ok. So. Kick ass story line? Check. But how about the rest of the game? I got some hands-on time with Darksiders at E3 and can say a few things about it. It struck me how incredibly similar to a Zelda game it feels. It is an open world game but through out the story War will have to make his way through dungeons. From what I was told by the guys over at THQ each dungeon will have a new item for War to acquire. Each item will be used to solve puzzles through out the dungeon and defeat the boss of the dungeon. Sounds a lot like Zelda huh?

The core combat of the game is focused on preforming combos with War’s big ass sword and gun. It is very reminiscent of the Devil May Cry games. The weapons in the game will be upgradable. War has horseman powers that were stripped from him after being blamed for starting the apocalypse. So part of the game will involve questing to get your powers back.

Darksiders is a game that I have been following for a while now. Every time I see it, it looks better and better. With what could be a good story, good gameplay, and a pretty cool art style, I can say I am genuinely excited for this game. The biggest criticism I have thus far is that it doesn’t feel innovative. It’s just grabbing bits and pieces of other games and stringing them together. That being said, it is grabbing bits and pieces of some of my favorite games (i.e. Zelda and Devil May Cry). I think we can expect a pretty solid title out of Darksiders, which hits stores on New Year’s Day 2010.