Toys of War Early Access Review

Toys of War is a war based game, which a charming visual depiction of light, armoured battles, and a serviceable amount of fun for multiplayer enthusiasts. The game sadly stumbles due to often terrible controls, a lack of worthwhile content, and overly little variety.

Toys of War’s core gameplay involves four war vehicles, one controlled by the player, the other three by AI opponents, or four players in multiplayer. Over the game’s various modes, the player’s primary objective is to either survive against or destroy the other three vehicles to win. Each match is made up of five rounds. Winning all five will grant the player victory. Players could pick between several vehicles such as a tank or a helicopter though some vehicles are locked off in several modes since the nature of the mode is designed to work only with that vehicle. Once deployed onto the battle zone, the land will change after each following match, with different walls for protection as well as vegetation and muddy grounds. Each vehicle is equipped with a single weapon, used to destroy the other vehicle. One, like the helicopter, fires small missiles at a rapid rate, while the tank fires a large missile, that takes a longer amount of time to reload.

Toys of War has up to ten modes. The first, and most basic, is Deathmatch, where players shoot at each other and the first to win every match in the tournament will claim the ultimate victory. In Spoils of war, players must pick up loot crates, falling from the sky, before the other players could touch them. Another mode, Bombshell, has players try and stay within an area of the map to avoid being bombarded by missiles. Some of these modes, like Bombshell, provide some different ideas than the others but they don’t make up for the fact that there aren’t many ideas going on in the game. All the modes basically revolve around blowing up the other vehicles and this none of the modes provide enough variety in their objectives to make you want to play it for hours on end.

The game’s art style is graphically similar to other Unity games like Rogues like us. While there are some rough edges in the game’s backgrounds, the game’s World War 2 inspired setting works well and manages to help immerse players, as well as a well-done score, that plays throughout the menu and matches.

During fights, the vehicles control reasonably well. Players move the war machine through the W, A, S and D keys, and fire their weapon with the left mouse button. With the position of the camera, the movement controls can occasionally become confusing and you struggle to figure out how to move in a certain direction. The controls in the menu, however, are appalling. The complete lack of support for the mouse makes getting around each of the game’s modes and managing AI and player vehicles a complete fiasco. You can eventually get to know how the controls work, but constantly using the keyboard, and the lack of some sufficient prompts to display the keys, makes the control system highly frustrating and confusing.

Alongside the game’s single-player offerings, players could compete in matches made up of other players, as they fight for supremacy for themselves. The multiplayer is set around the same matches as in the rest of the game and players are given the same rules as they are given when fighting against AI opponents. because of the game’s small-scale and lack of depth compared to other multiplayer games, matches in multiplayer can feel very familiar to matches players have taken part in by themselves. However, playing with friends with a microphone makes things much better and Further add much more replayability to the game.

Toys of War has a lot of potential with its premise but most of it feels underdeveloped. The modes, while there are a lot of them, don’t contain enough depth or variety to distinguish themselves as unique ways of play. Multiplayer provides some benefits that add to the game’s replayability, but with the lack of worthwhile content, the game eventually succumbs to repetition.

REVIEW CODE: A PC code was provided to Brash Games for this review. Please send all review code enquiries to editor@brashgames.co.uk.