Toy Commander

It’s difficult to judge solely from the cover what kind of game this is, but the first real mission spells it out: drive an RC car up a series of oddly modeled ramps to get onto a countertop, and push an egg into a pot of boiling water using the collision physics. From there the game skews towards more traditional objectives — combat and racing — but the mission design still includes unique geometry as a key consideration. Many missions provide rickety, railless scaffolding for the player’s vehicles to climb even without extraneous obstacles to push them off or impede their progress. Given that every mission is played against a par time, simply lighting a fire under the player is enough to force tight execution on these perilous ascents.

Toy Commander increasingly features planes as primary vehicle in each level as the game progresses, but the core concepts above still come into play. A lack of separated roll and yaw control make turns slow and wide, and the game preys on this weakness through tight geometry. Flying through the legs of a chair or under a slanted plank may not seem difficult generically, but in air-race missions, the focus on smooth movement between waypoints encourages players to think ahead about their turns in order to line themselves up for narrow lanes. In combat contexts, this principle holds as well. Although missile lock-on is generous and wide,¹ one mission late in the game places a retrievable bomb in a fishtank. The multi-floor combat zone shrinks to an armament-laden box once the player lowers themself inside and attempts to clear out the turrets and other artillery hidden inside the aquatic decorations. By combining the cramped space with certain unusual aspects of the flight model — planes can freely fly against the ground or walls, and they never stall — the designers present an unusual flight combat experience completely divorced from traditional dogfighting.

Each mission adds character with a selection of bespoke elements dumped into a basic room template. Although parts of the geometry persist between missions, oftentimes these additional elements radically change the area. [src]

That retrievable bomb also points to another element of Toy Commander’s mission design: cooperating vehicles. The game clearly demarcates between vehicles with weaponry and vehicles with cargo space in an attempt to introduce light tactics to the experience. In many cases, one or more combat vehicles must clear out spaces for payload vehicles to enter and collect cargo. However, vehicles can only be swapped when fully at-rest, which makes switching away from flying vehicles especially cumbersome. In practice, most levels are solved with one full-area sweep of the combat vehicle and a subsequent cargo transport step without any interplay. The designers occasionally attempt to work around this. In some missions, the player is given only a transport vehicle with pre-loaded combat figurines that can be deployed for static gunfire. These play out as wonky RTS-lites and rarely escalate beyond skipping enemy outposts and killing others through safe areas. In the final area, the missions pivot to full-on autonomous warfare, with a base that must be protected by the player’s vehicular forces. If given time to soak, actual multi-tasking may have been more of a factor in these, but given the time attack requirement, racing towards the objective before enemy forces do any significant damage ends up nullifying the other playstyle.

Still, the root idea of that initial hard-boiled egg mission returns in the more experimental missions. These often use obstructive-but-harmless entities to great effect to push the player around or disrupt the dynamic physics objects. When featured at the start of areas, they also provide a calm introduction to the topology of each room and important landmarks. Unfortunately, the majority of areas forego this in favor of a race, highlighting certain engine quirks, such as an inability to track positions or enforce commitment to the track outside of giant waypoint rings. These increasingly feature flight vehicles as the designers determine that their simplistic car model, devoid of real grip or weight, simply isn’t up to the task of consistent, intuitive handling. In many games this would be a massive red flag; in Toy Commander’s sandbox, the half-baked ideas are all part of the fun.