Just two years ago, every review written of a game in the "Tower Defense" genre started off with a long description of how it worked. Now, there have been enough games with the same concept that the introductory explanation is able to be shortened from a long diatribe to a single sentence: players build defensive structures to prevent waves of opponents from reaching a location. It's an increasingly common premise, and one that's shared with a number of other games like Pixeljunk Monsters and Defense Grid. While it's part of a genre that has been growing exponentially as of recent, the latest entry in the genre, Toy Soldiers, manages to do a good job separating itself from the rest of its contemporaries with a unique setting and a number of gameplay elements that help make everything feel wholly fresh.

The reason that everything feels so new is because of the game's brilliant style, which has players defending a toy box from toy soldiers out of a World War I set. On an elaborate setup, the toys go to war, and the player needs to build gun emplacements to stop them. There are a number of different types to put down, each filling the basic role the genre calls for. The archetypal defense structures of anti-air guns, machine gun turrets, and basic splash damage weapons start the player off, while more are added as the game progresses. Eventually, giant cannons are taking down dozens of enemy units at once, and flamethrowers are scorching enemies as they attempt to crawl under player-placed barbed wire.