Toy Tactics Review

Toy Tactics really reminds me of a mobile game, and I don’t mean that negatively. It gives me the same sort of feeling as Balatro, which is some of the highest praise I can give. It manages to take the real-time strategy format and translates it into small, more digestible chunks, with a charming style and unique mechanics to match.

RTS is not a genre I typically go for, not that I dislike them, but I lack the ability to micromanage every last detail, which can be a bit of a problem when it comes to really delving into the genre. Toy Tactics manages to keep a lot of the RTS style and charm, without it feeling as painfully intense as some of its contemporaries. The campaign initially gives you control over the Imperium (before opening up to four other factions), a Roman-inspired army, in a series of maps with a basic set of objectives. It’s a simple system, but these maps do add some interesting challenges, with some including a lot of verticality and others being built with a more narrow structure to create some unique challenges with how you choose to position your units. This is where the game's primary mechanic comes into play: the brush. This brush allows you to directly draw the formation of your units, rather than a more traditional system. It’s a creative, and incredibly intuitive system, despite some slightly wonky controls. Being able to draw a formation and have your units conform directly to these drawings just works so well. Drawing multiple different formations is where the issues come in, as you begin to create more and more groups, it gets more awkward to manage them, and recombining them can occasionally be finicky.

Beyond the five campaigns, you also have access to five other modes: Skirmish, Puzzles, Mercenaries, Sandbox, and Multiplayer. Each of these is very well fleshed out, which gives the game a surprising amount of content. Skirmishes are simple maps, one for each faction, where you simply fight to capture camps and survive against waves and waves of increasingly strong enemies. It's simple, but effective, and pretty solid in its execution. Puzzles give you a set army, and spell loadout — spells being powers you can use when they’re charged up, from a rain of arrows, to Byzantine Fire to leave traps, or even summoning flaming whirlwinds. They’re pretty simple at first glance, but there’s a lot of depth here too. Mercenaries mode gives you a budget to purchase units and items, very similar to the puzzle mode but with more freedom, and an interesting goal to chase, being able to attempt runs with less money spent. Sandbox is exactly what it sounds like, a series of maps (one for each faction), to test out different units, factions, or even just a way to pit certain armies against each other for the fun of it. While I spent the majority of my time within the Campaign, Toy Tactics has a genuinely fantastic breadth of content to explore.

This title really shines when it comes to presentation, both in the visual and audio departments. Each faction is formed with a bunch of miniature figures, who are nicely detailed and incredibly distinct. There’s a very satisfying physics engine at play too; the miniatures bounce around as they move, and any explosions or more powerful hits can send not only yours and the enemy units flying around, but also a lot of the environment. Throughout the campaign you’ll have regular intervention from Sun Tzu himself, giving you tips and advice on how to proceed, and the voice acting here is also really solid, it’s charming, and I did really enjoy everytime he popped up, considering the quality of the writing is also top-notch.

As a whole package, Toy Tactics is genuinely wonderful, aside from some incredibly minor gripes with the control scheme, it’s one of the most satisfying RTS, or even strategy as a whole genre, games that I have ever played, and is absolutely worth picking up!