Drawing your way to victory on a map sounds silly, especially when your soldiers’ lives depends on you. But with Toy Tactics, drawing formations and coordinating assaults is everything. You live and die depending on your formations, making use of every soldier’s unique ability. Utilize your faction’s unique powers and spells to gain advantages in combat. Change your soldier’s equipment to suit the strategies you have in mind.
Toy Tactics is a strategy simulation game by Kraken Empire where you lead your armies to battle. It isn’t the easiest strategy game to learn because your troops have a near-infinite number of formations. Thinking before you leap is a core part of the game as reinforcements are often hard to come by. It’s a shame that many formations are useless even if they are cool. The physics-based combat is also disadvantageous at several points. But despite its flaws, Toy Tactics delivers a unique strategy experience that tests your mental prowess.
Every mission takes place in a skirmish where you must use your soldiers to defeat the enemy. You must draw formations using your brush and move your army forward. With the correct formations and proper planning, you can overcome any enemies in your way. Direct combat isn’t your only option for victory either; you can exploit the environment to defeat your enemies.
Drawing your unit formations is Toy Tactics’ main unique draw. Instead of dragging your cursor over a group of units, you use a brush and “draw” their formation. This lets you organize your units to suit the upcoming battles. It also helps you funnel them through narrow bridges and paths without causing a bottleneck. You can also separate your soldiers into groups with these formations, covering more ground.
Drawing formations is fun and lets you take advantage of a unit’s special qualities. You can position archers along proper lines or whatever shape they need for battle. Infantry can stand in a line or provide circular defenses for ranged units. Cavalry can be positioned for maximum effectiveness when charging at an army. Charging at your enemy with a mass of troops is rarely effective. You must consider how each unit will fight and move, then draw a formation to help them perform.
Controlling your unit’s formations also gives you the benefit of additional strategy. If your units are outnumbered after a bad battle, you can re-organize them to minimize losses. Should you gain use of a high tower, draw a formation that lets you fit as many ranged units as possible. The formations you draw can bring out your army’s best or worst and it’s crucial to know the difference.
The downside of drawing your own formations is that you can’t be as crazy or design-heavy as you like. Your soldiers stick to the formations without deviating meaning that troops in the rear don’t advance. While this is great for certain situations, most of the time it means your enemy can overpower the units at the front of a formation. This leads to your formation collapsing and several troops falling without doing much.
Your soldiers don’t respond well to changing formations on the fly, meaning your strategies are locked in. While you can easily restart a level, this often puts you back at the beginning. Fighting your way through a level repeatedly until you find the right strategy is exhausting. Toy Tactics isn’t a difficult game per se but there’s a lot of experimentation involved. Finding out a formation’s strengths and weaknesses takes time, and you only learn when it succeeds or fails.
Formations are one part of your repertoire, with the others being magic and equipment. Every faction has access to unique magic spells. While there are some similarities across factions, the spells work differently for the most part. Equipment gives your units new traits that can help them succeed against foes they would normally lose against. Heroic units can also gain effects that benefit your army.
This level of customization expands your strategic options and encourages new tactics. They can also turn the tide of battle in case your formations didn’t work as expected. If you are struggling to complete a mission, you can always change your magic and equipment. Magic and equipment won’t make or break a mission; you can win with just your units. But by using the options available to you, you open up possibilities that let you win in creative ways.
Physics-based combat is another unique part of the gameplay, letting you use your environment in creative ways. Soldiers can die from being crushed by objects or falling off high ground. Projectiles gain momentum fired from high ground and long distances. Downward slopes help cavalry accelerate, letting them charge faster for more damage. This opens up other ways of winning like pushing enemies off cliffs or into deep water.
It’s great to turn the tables on your enemies without risking the lives of your soldiers. Most strategy games don’t let you push enemies off cliffs or drop a boulder on them. But Toy Tactics lets you use anything and everything to your advantage. It makes gameplay exciting since you consider more possibilities than “larger army beats smaller army”. Anyone can turn the tables if you aren’t paying attention.
However, physics-based combat works both ways and it can be inconvenient to you. Your soldiers might die if they can’t move out of a boulder’s path fast enough. Sometimes a bad formation costs you half your army trying to cross a narrow bridge. Soldiers cause bottlenecks because they get stuck on paths and can’t move. It’s tough to learn because several deaths might happen when you aren’t looking.
Toy Tactics isn’t perfect and does have its share of flaws. But it provides a fresh breath of air to the strategy genre. Creating the best formations and bringing out the potential of your strategies never gets old. Using anything and everything available to you makes you feel like a true strategist. The game brings out the best of physics-based combat and encourages you to find strategies that work for you. If that doesn’t work, go back to the drawing board and come up with something new.
Victor reviewed Toy Tactics on PC with a review code.
