Nintendo Switch Critic Reviews

Considering the visuals, gameplay, replayability, and online options, Toy Soldiers HD is very well done and fun to play. Figuring out how to best use your units is almost as much fun as enacting a campaign in your childhood sandbox.

Twelve years after the original release, this port of Toy Soldiers feels a bit dated. Sure, there’s some mild gratification found in gunning down the game’s mechanical infantry. But between the infuriatingly resistant bosses and the negligible improvements, you’ll want to think twice before enlisting.

Toy Soldiers HD is a competent preservation of a classic Xbox Live Arcade Game. Even with an HD coat of paint, this release feels far less memorable than the game we saw over a decade ago. The single-player has plenty of content enhanced by a uniquely charming presentation and art style. Still, the tower defense gameplay can only stay fresh for so long before it runs thin. There’s hardly going to be an active online community for this one, so unless you’ve found some players to connect with, there won’t be much to keep you hooked.

Toy Soldiers HD is a tough one to recommend. The game hasn’t really changed for better or worse, making it both fun to revisit while being a bit ugly to look at. Most of the time the game is fun enough to ignore any of the graphical shortcomings or the frame rate issues, but sometimes the difficulty spikes can be a bit discouraging. Overall, this is a barebones HD remake that could’ve used some more fine tuning especially in the graphics department. Here’s to hoping this unique franchise can be revitalized in the future but, as for Toy Soldiers HD, this battlefield has seen better days.

Perhaps the most appropriate way to describe the Toy Soldiers HD experience in 2023 is “quaint”. Essentially, you’re playing a defunct and superseded genre, blended with ancient action mechanics, more than 10 years old. There has been no meaningful effort to do much more than upscale the visuals. Therefore, what you’ve got here is something that has its charms, but is archaic on every level. Toy Soldiers was never good enough to be a “classic”, so you don’t even get to enjoy the retro nostalgia that comes from early-era PS3/Xbox 360 games now. It’s just dated.