Full-featured 3D tower defense games are pretty rare, but if you're into this genre, you should check out Toy Shire's demo, which was released just last week. In Toy Shire, you are a child whose toys are at war with each other as your brand new green army men fight against the old waves or robots, dinosaurs and the like who are determined to keep their place as the toy of choice.
The demo is three levels long and includes gun, cannon and mortar turrets, as well as RTS-style troops commanding with rifles, grenades, sniper rifles and machine guns. They are all designed to defend tower defense lanes marked with things like wooden blocks and plastic LEGO bricks.
The real appeal here is that it just looks damn good for a tower defense and the perspective of a child looking down at his toys is a nice change of pace. New units and towers are literally placed by hand as the child bends over to drop them onto the board. This also allows your camera to pan into the action as you see everything from the child's point of view.
The demo is fairly short but sweet enough and shows off a decent variety of speeds and abilities of your robot enemies. In fact, the final level was so surprising that it took me a few shots to beat it – nice to see and a good sign of a final game that takes off the kid gloves, if you'll pardon the pun. However, I wasn't entirely sold on the RTS-style troops – they felt a bit too fragile compared to investing the resources you earned into permanent upgrades for the towers.
You can test the demo for free Toy Shire: Room One on Steam next to the page for Toy Shire correct. Toy Shire is developed by Bluespy Studios and published by Catropic Games and is scheduled for release between April and June 2024.
