Gameplay
Greed Corp is a land grab game that plays out on hexagonal boards. As resources are harvested the ground beneath you begins to crumble. Stay and harvesting in one place too long will eventually lead to the ground falling apart and units lost. Maps are presented to the player as hexagonal tiles of different heights, with the whole of the battlefield floating over a thick mist. Your objective is always to be the last man standing. A faction is eliminated when all their building and units are destroyed. The problem I have found is that you never know who is winning. I have had several games where I have the most units or feel I am taking the enemy out only to lose a few rounds later. The tutorial also doesn’t do a great job of explaining what it is you are suppose to be doing. The tutorial presents you with a game and tells you what moves to make to win, but never explains why you are making those moves. This made the learning curve a bit steep as I started playing the single player campaign. The game only offers 5 different units to use to battle with. This might seem like it would be lacking but the 5 units are balanced well and provide a lot of strategy when playing. Greed Corp also features a multiplayer if you are looking to challenge yourself against another human player.  I managed to get in a few games online and it seemed the people I played against were having a similar experience to mine. We all had the basic idea down but really weren’t sure of what strategy to use against each other. I did have a lot of fun playing online but I feel the overall experience would have been better if the tutorial had offered more.

Graphics/Sound
The graphics and sound of the game are both well done. The art style is a very colorful steam-punk type look. Each unit features a lot of moving parts and effects to fit the steam-punk style. The sounds for each unit really make it feel like they are destroying the land around them. The music feels like a techno take on 1960’s music. During a game it feels very appropriate but the music during the menus does get a little annoying at time. W!Games has said this is the first in a series of game in their Mistbound universe. I hope they continue to stick with a similar style for future titles.

Overall
If you are a fan of either turn based strategy games or board games, you should check out Greed Corp. Giving the choice to either harvest everything you have or go take everything from your opponent adds a nice touch to strategy game formula. The single player will offer plenty of hours of fun and the option to go online just adds to the value. Greed Corp is 800MSP and  available now on the Xbox Live Marketplace.

Gameplay

The campaign allows you to experience 24 action packed missions playing as both the Allied and Central armies. Your goal on each map is to defend your toy box from wave after wave of oncoming troops and vehicles. This is done by building different defensive structures on specific build sites. Each map has a set number of areas where you can place your defensive structures, so you have to chose wisely. To be able to build you have to be able to afford the construction, and money is earned from every kill. The main feature that sets this apart from other tower defense games is the ability to control of any structure and take out the enemies on your own. You are able to zoom-in to the weapon’s point of view, use the left stick to aim and the right to fire. As you progress you also gain the chance to pilot airplanes and drive tanks as well. The easier difficulty provides a lot of fun for the casual player. As you increase the difficulty the game presents you with a real challenge. When set to the hardest difficulty, the towers no longer fire on their own. This means you know have to be able to bounce around to each one in order to take out the enemy. The bosses in this game are larger toys in many forms such as a huge tank, a railroad gun, and a zeppelin aircraft. Once the campaign has been completed, you then unlock the survival mode where you fight against countless waves of enemy toys desperately trying to defeat you. Also included is a two-player versus mode. This is playable locally in split screen or online. Here, each side sends waves of soldiers at the opponent with the Y button, but they also have to build units in order to defend their toy box from the waves being sent by the opponent. Toy Soldiers offers a lot of different options to players and should provide hours of entertainment.

Graphics/Sound

The game stays true to its name and provides a toy like feel to all the models. The environment looks and feels like a WWI recreation someone would have in their basement. The backdrops for each level are painted on a piece of wood and certain areas are open so that you can see the rest of the room. The character animations are one of my favorite parts of the game. The soldiers have a look similar to the plastic toys but feature exaggerated animations. This really adds a lot of fun to the feel of the game. Seeing a soldier firing a gun at enemies while bouncing around in the seat was a nice touch. The sound effects are done well and help add to the feel of the game. While getting close to what war might sound like they also manage to keep the effects close to what plastic figures exploding would sound like. The music selection was excellent. Period specific music plays during loading and helps carry the WWI feel into the game.

Overall

Toy Soldiers is the best tower defense game on XBLA. It takes a genre that over time has continued to grow stale and brought new life to it. There were plenty of times that I was playing and never even thought it was a tower defense game. If you have been a bit skeptical about picking this up, at least give the demo a try. This is an excellent XBLA release and already one of my favorite games this year. Toy Soldiers is available now for 1200 MS Points.

]]> http://pixelatedgeek.com/2010/03/indie-review-toy-soldiers/feed/ 0 http://pixelatedgeek.com/2010/03/xbla-preview-toy-soldiers/ http://pixelatedgeek.com/2010/03/xbla-preview-toy-soldiers/#comments Tue, 02 Mar 2010 05:11:05 +0000 Billy http://pixelatedgeek.com/?p=19559 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.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Gameplay

When I first started the game and was going through the tutorial I was immediately reminded of Braid, another popular XBLA indie game. While you don’t manipulate time in the same way you did in Braid, both do provide a heavily stylized world and charming character. In P.B. Winterbottom, you are a mustached man who is incredibly obsessed with pies. This obsession leads you to chasing a pie that when caught allows you to manipulate time and space and create clones of yourself. The clones are able to use switches, stack on each other, and hit around the levels so that you can capture even more pies. The 51 levels in P.B. Winterbottom vary greatly and provide a nice range of difficulty as well as certain rules to follow. Early on the game is focused on just collecting the pies you see on screen. As you progress the game will start adding more of a challenge by limiting the number of clones you can use, or wanting the pies to grabbed in a certain order. The game also offers some added fun in some levels by making your clones kill you. The cat and mouse type chase on top of the already challenging puzzle of gathering the pies adds a lot of excitement to the game.

Graphics/Sound

The game setting is that of a 1920s Victorian style city. Signature alley ways and clock towers can be seen throughout the games many levels. The art style itself is similar to that of famous macabre illustrator, Edward Gorey. The color palette chosen for the game seems very dull at first, but as the game progresses, really helps add a lot to the world. A lot of details that might be overlooked in a game with brighter colors really stands out here. The main character, P.B. Winterbottom, seems to be modeled after silent film great Charlie Chaplin. Outfitted with an umbrella and rather tall top hat, Winterbottom is a perfect fit for the silent film era the game is going for. His movement even feels like you are playing an old Chaplin film. The art style is even more enhanced with the help of the music. While trying to have it’s own sounds and play as almost a parody to the music is the previously mentioned examples, the game manages to provide an overall happy and fun feel to the game.

Overall

The Odd Gentlemen’s debut game, The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom, brings an art style and unique mechanic to a creativity lacking puzzle genre of the XBLA library. A game that offers both fun gameplay and the ability to challenge you to think outside the box should always be praised in hopes that more games will follow in its footsteps. P.B. Winterbottom will challenge you, and maybe even make you a little upset, but when you finally accomplish that puzzle and ultimately beat the game, the rewarding feeling that if offered is something that is rarely matched in a game. Available for only 800 MSP/$10, I can’t help but strongly recommend this as a must buy for anyone that enjoys fun and intelligent puzzle games.

Greed Corp: Why share when you can have it all? Greed Corp is an online multiplayer strategy game in which you battle for dominance over a world once rich in resources. In order to prevail, you must exhaust all remaining resources to build an army, and use the depleted collapsing terrain to your advantage. An extensive campaign mode and multiple unlockables prepare you to take the battle online.

Price: 800 MS Points  /   Click to add to Download Queue

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Lazy Raiders: Dr. Diggabone’s getting too old for archaeological digs, or so he says. But truth be told, he’s just plain lazy… Unlock the Full Game and send the Doctor or your Xbox LIVE Avatar on a gravity-defying quest through 75 mazes by spinning and flipping the world. Beware those thieves, minions and traps, though. Without any challenge, you’d just grow lazy… and we wouldn’t want that, now would we?

Price: 800 MS Points  /   Click to add to Download Queue

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Fret Nice: FRET NICE is a 2D platformer that’ll rock your world. Control your character through funky-fresh stages to explore hidden areas, collect items, and clash note-for-note with outrageous, heavy metal bosses! Rock out by blasting enemies with riff combos and creating your own sounds with each “strum” of a chord!

Price: 1200 MS Points  /   Click to add to Download Queue