Toy Commander | Review | Dreamcast — The Retro Perspective

Developer: No Cliché
Publisher: SEGA
Platform: Dreamcast

You’d be hard-pressed to find people with any kind of childhood that didn’t at some point arrange their toys in such a way to form some sort of city or contraption, guiding miniature figures through & imagining crazy stories & scenarios in their kid brain. I know I certainly went through a phase of driving toy cars along the carpet, up the wall, down bannisters...on the ceiling if I could reach it. So when I first played a demo for Toy Commander on the Dreamcast back in 1999, I was struck by how the game captured that essence of childhood imagination so perfectly and that short snippet of the game stuck with me ever since.

Now almost 20 years later I’ve finally got round to playing the full game. In many ways, it’s exactly the game I expected it to be. In others, not so much. The basic premise of Toy Commander is that a group of your toys have rebelled against you & you take control of a number of vehicle toys ranging from trucks to planes to helicopters, to take back your house room by room. You do that by taking on various obstacle course-like challenges set up by the evil toys & beating their time records on each level.

The variety on offer here is tremendous. Some missions are simple, like a classic race to the finish line. Others could see you making use of multiple vehicles over land & air, completing a series of objectives that could involve transporting objects, rescuing stranded toys or everyone's favourite: blowing stuff to smithereens. One of the best-constructed missions has you flying over an enemy base in the living room, taking out its defences before rushing in with a truck to steal a bomb, you then need to blow up a bridge to the base, (made out of a wooden bench) all before a large enemy convoy arrives from the kitchen.

Sometimes this isn't quite as simple as it sounds. The game has a rather dated physics engine which can often lead to frustration when the player is asked to push objects around the environment. A slight miscalculation & the object is likely to go practically any other direction than forwards. Missions where objects can simply be picked up & added to your inventory with the push of a button and dropped off in the same manner feel instantly more satisfying.

Then there's the weapon system which is shared between all the vehicles in the game. Your standard machine gun can only fire directly in front of your toy, making precise aiming a nightmare to pull off, especially when speed & precision are a core aspect of moving forward in the game. Luckily there's an array of special weapons, often limited in number, that give the player a sharper edge in combat when aiming for the record times. The homing missile (always a favourite in retro games such as this) is by far the most useful but certain situations call for mines or bombs to be deployed. Each weapon can be upgraded in firepower several times within a mission too if you find the right pickup. Other pickups include fuel, which must be topped up periodically, and repairs packs.

Aesthetically, the game delivers on its clear vision perfectly. The aforementioned weapons are not just imaginary items in our protagonist’s mind, they are makeshift variations of household items. The missile is a pen lid, the mine a drawing pin. Toy Commander’s level design also follows this clever aesthetic. The kid has stacked wood planks and toy buildings across chairs, tables and sofas and used things like shoes to form an obstacle on a race track for instance. Every piece of the environment is purposely handcrafted to deliver a representation of this perhaps rather eccentric kid simply playing with his toys.

If you think the visual aesthetics are nostalgic, that’s nothing compared to the music! Following in the vein of many games that had come out earlier in the 90s, Toy Commander features a brilliantly produced electronica soundtrack. Composer Frédérick Raynal has blended a variety of spacey saw synths & breakbeats with the occasional orchestral stabs to inject a bit of drama. A few tracks such as ‘Lost Strings’ are also reminiscent of Frank Klepacki’s Command and Conquer soundtracks, bolstering the slight hints of strategy game tones that Toy Commander already possessed.

Once you've beaten the high scores on 3 levels in a specific part of the house you can face the boss of the area. These bosses while a nice idea, don't really make good use of the gameplay systems in place, opting for more of a head-to-head game of who can kill the other faster by shooting the crap out of them. This idea of replaying challenges over & over to reach a certain proficiency level is a rather archaic one & may frustrate players without much free time that still want to experience the whole game but on the other hand, replaying levels makes you appreciate the ideas & game design philosophy the developers were going for with Toy Commander. Once defeated, these bosses will turn back to your side and be controllable in the final battle against Huggy Bear for the title of Toy Commander. Interestingly, you can choose to fight Huggy Bear early but face a much-increased challenge, as all the bosses you have yet to defeat will be right there fighting with him.

If you can look past its awkward controls which have dated the game tremendously, Toy Commander has a tonne of varied levels to offer an avid high scorer or speedrunner. Others might find it a repetitive slog to make the progress needed to see the whole game through. Though 9 year old me would have taken this game as possibly the best thing since barcode battlers & be begging for a sequel, more than many other games I’ve played Toy Commander is perhaps a game only of its particular time. It’s certainly one of those games that make the Dreamcast the intriguing and enigmatic console it is, but I’m unsure whether its game design holds much relevance for the video game industry going forward.

Toy Commander | Review | Dreamcast

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