Toy Soldiers: War Chest is a fast-paced action-strategy game that brings iconic toys from your childhood to life such as He-Man and G.I. Joe. It is also the first title in the series not to be a Microsoft console exclusive. I expected this game to be amazing judging by how it wants to appeal to others who haven’t heard of the series but I was mistaken. While the controls, gameplay and features show improvements, the pricing model is just too much.
Before I get into that, let me talk about how much I enjoyed it. This game is immensely fun to play and it’s available at a great price to begin with. However, War Chest has some faults like any other video game. The first Toy Soldiers game came out about give years ago with War Chest being the third in the series. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the series, it’s a standard tower defence game which allows the player to directly commandeer one of the tower placements or the hero units to defend your base against an enemy invasion. It’s a lot like Smite to be honest but instead of gods you have toys.
It also involves slowly upgrading upgrading your towers to stop bigger waves of enemies. Think of it as a mixture between Smite and Defense Grid 2 on Xbox One. The controls are fine and they have always been adequate since the franchise’s inception but there are some glaring flaws. Don’t get me wrong, there’s variety in the toys, the tower defence elements are fun and expanded upon, but the way the publisher wants to take money from customers is a little concerning. Value is an important consideration you have to take into account when reviewing a game.
The main problem with War Chest is that all of the cameo characters come with a cost if you download the game. You will have the buy the cameo characters as add-ons. That can get really expensive because all the best ones are behind paywalls. The base package really grant you nothing and to truly experience the title you have to buy them all. There’s a Hall of Fame Edition for $30 but considering that that price is approaching titles like Gears of War: Ultimate Edition and many discounted AAA titles during Deals with Gold sales, it’s hard to swallow.
Now, I love this series and would gladly pay for that but there are also microtransactions. The microtransactions are expensive. I calculated how much I would have to spend on this title and it came out to roughly $60. That’s the price of a AAA title. Had the game released as a free-to-play title I would’ve been fine with that but it’s not and no matter how fun it is, it doesn’t represent good value.
Going back to the final part of the title, one of the things I had a lot of fun playing was the online portion of the game. Being able to play against your friends is great. There were a few bugs occasionally like when I got stuck on the side a few times but that was really it. I got disconnected a few times as well but apart from that it was good. I just wish the pricing model was better because this game is a lot of fun. The microtransactions ruined the experience for me. Taking everything into account, I would still give Toy Soldiers: War Chest a 6 out of 10. I just wish they would reward loyal fans of the franchise instead of trying to gouge money out of them.
The opinions expressed belong to the writer and do not necessarily reflect that of ICXM as an organization.
Ata was a community contributor to ICXM, writing 1 article in 2015 covering game reviews. ICXM operated as an independent Xbox and Windows gaming outlet through the Xbox One’s first full year of post-launch coverage, including the early days of Backwards Compatibility and Windows 10 gaming, drawing from a rotating bench of editorial volunteers. They post on X as @09aozdemir.