There are three versions of the original Toy Soldiers on Steam, which is already a bad sign, but to make it worse, all of them have reviews complaining about bugs, including many reports that the game won't run at all. I don't know what the story is behind all these broken releases, but it's insulting. I naively bought this version thinking it looked the best and because it's the only option that includes the sequel, Toy Soldiers: Cold War.

The two games are very similar but Cold War is significantly better. The theming is much clearer and generally lends itself better to the gameplay. They nail the red scare aesthetic and pack the game full of 80s references. I actually played both games about two years apart because the first Toy Soldiers is almost unplayable. There are so many bugs but honestly I played it so long ago I can't remember what they were. All I can recall is the rage they induced in me. The bosses especially seemed to not work at all, some of them getting stuck and others depleting all my lives only a few seconds after spawning in.

The gameplay is rough across both games though. Several turrets are borderline useless. Every once in a while you'll place a turret only to find that because it can't look up or down that it's incapable of hitting anything at all. But the turrets hardly even matter, there are player-controlled vehicles that outperform every turret every time, sort of making the tower defense aspect feel tacked on in a tower defense game. The bosses emphasize this even more by being able to wipe out half your turrets in about a second several times during a battle. Lastly the controls are atrocious, that goes for controller or mouse and keyboard. The airplanes function so poorly that you wonder if anyone actually tested them even once.

I wouldn't recommend the first Toy Soldiers at all due to the aforementioned bugs, and while Cold War is more polished it doesn't hold up beyond a mild amusement. Mild amusements can be worth the time and money but not when that money is going to a developer that actively sells three different versions of the same fifteen year old XBLA game, none of which seem to work properly or even moderately decent.

this would be an awesome game.
if you are ok with the following, i recommend it
-camera is ♥♥♥♥. looks at the ground, you have no idea what planes exist
-controlling what you build is ♥♥♥♥. you click once, but there is a chance that the menu that opens selects an option. so you end up buying a defense you do not need, you sell it at a loss and you try again
-controlling aircraft is ♥♥♥♥
-defenses that are supposed to defend "ground" are unable to fire at the enemy if they are too high above the road. there is no way to see where it can aim BEFORE you buy the defense. again, loss of currency
-"intros" to maps are un-skippable. after you failed the map the 3-rd time and you want to skip the intro... you can not
a much better system is the one from "iron grip warlord". you load the map, then you can "god-fly" around and get familiar to it, then when you start the map, you understand the layout and you can understand pathways of the enemy
-the map is tiny compared to how bad aircraft can be handled. which means you can hit a "wall" easy and lose your aircraft
-anti tank defenses are ♥♥♥♥ compared to even troop transports. on top of that, they have low ammo