Toy Soldiers: War Chest Walkthrough and Guide

Described by publisher Ubisoft as a “fast-paced genre-bending mix of strategy and action game play that brings to life the iconic toys and action figures from your childhood,” Toy Soldiers: War Chest is the third game in the well-established main Toy Soldiers series created by game developer Signal Studios.

The main series consists of the following games:

• Toy Soldiers (March 2010) Steam PC, X360, and PS3

• Toy Soldiers - The Kaiser's Battle DLC Pack (June 2010) Steam PC, X360, and PS3

• Toy Soldiers - Invasion! DLC Pack (September 2010) Steam PC, X360, and PS3

• Toy Soldiers: Cold War (August 2011) Steam PC, X360, and PS3

• Toy Soldiers: Cold War - Evil Empire (April 2012) Steam PC, X360, and PS3

• Toy Soldiers: Cold War - Napalm (April 2012) Steam PC, X360, and PS3

• Toy Soldiers: War Chest (August 2015) Steam PC, X1, and PS4

The first two titles in the series, Toy Soldiers (2010), and Toy Soldiers: Cold War (2011) set the stage for the basic premise of the game play mechanics and the stories.

Picture in your mind the green plastic molded toy soldier - if you are old enough, you will remember them from your own toy box.

A toy that was both simple, elegant, and available practically everywhere. When we say "everywhere" we mean just that - in toy stores, in hospital gift shops, from trading stamp catalogs, and especially via mail-order toy dealers!

For the serious Toy Soldier Gamer it was the Woolies or K-Mart sourced 3-D semi-soft plastic soldiers that pretty much made up the primary companies of your army. For the serious Toy Soldier Gamer with access to ready funds though, it really was no question where your defense dollars were earmarked for and spent: Britains Deetail!

The Soldiers you got at K-Mart had no base, plastic or otherwise, so if you were not playing sandbox war it was rather difficult to get them to stay standing - and a lot of your troops were declared dead if they fell, so yeah, not the ideal source for recruiting good combat teams.

The Woolies Soldiers came with plastic bases that their boots were attached to - which was infinitely better than the ones without bases, but they had their own issues. The design of a lot of the heavy weapons units were slightly imbalanced so that a near-miss with marble-arty (especially when sand was kicked up by an Aggie) could take out troops that were well outside the immediate area of damage due to their unstable weight distribution on the plastic bases.

But the forces recruited from Britains Deetail? Whoa now, that was an entirely different league of soldier!

They were made from the semi-soft colored plastic to be sure, but they featured METAL bases! Those babies did NOT fall over due to a little sand kicked up by an Aggie that missed the mark, let me tell ya mates!

The most prized of all of the different Britains Deetail sets in order of perceived value (to us) - with the more valuable and strategic at the top of the list:

• German Wehrmacht Set 1 (12 Infantry, 2-Man Mortar Crew, Motorcycle Dispatch Rider, Motorcycle-and-Sidecar with a mounted Medium-MG, a 2-Man Kettenkrad, a 2-Man Kubelwagen that was armed with a mounted Medium-MG, and a PAK 40 Anti-Armor gun)

• British ETO Set 1 (x6 Infantry, x2 Mortar, Motorcycle Dispatch Rider, Daimler Scout car w/ x2 crew, x1 17lb AT Gun, x1 25lb AT Gun, and an Assault Boat w/ 2-Man Crew)

• US GI Set (6 Infantry, 2-Man Crew and Willys Jeep, and 2-Man Assault Craft)

• German Wehrmacht Set 2 (x1 MG34 kneeling, x1 Charging Gewehr 41 w/ Fixed Bayonet, x1 Model 24 Grenade Thrower, x1 Standing Gewehr 41, x1 Advancing MP40, and x1 Panzerbüchse Anti-Armor Gun with Ammo Box).

• German Wehrmacht Set 3 x1 Officer, x1 Radio Operator, x1 Kneeling Gewehr 41, x1 Marching Gewehr 24, x1 Flamethrower, and x1 Panzerbüchse Anti-Tank Gun).

Do note that the second US GI Set of 6 Infantry, 2-man Recoilless Rifle crew, PAK Howitzer, and Motorcycle Dispatch Messenger only appeared after 1979, which was well past when we stopped playing Toy Soldiers. And it's not like we liked the Germans or anything, they just had more diverse weapons and German Set 1 had twice the troops as any of the other sets.

There were some more mixed German sets and of course the modern sets that included a Scots Guards quad, SAS Squad, and a Sentry Box Set, but we did not play with those. Too modern basically.

Then there were the special "bargain" sets we ordered from the ads on the inside back cover of our Comic Books. Comic books like Battlefield Action, Blackhawk, G.I. Combat, Sgt. Fury and his Fighting Commandos, Sgt. Rock, and our all-time favorite title, Weird Tales!

Despite the long wait and expense (we eventually found an alternate and cheaper source from China), those sets of 200+ units arrived in a brown-paper-wrapped wooden GI Footlocker that came all the way from New York City which just added to their perceived value. But believe me, we paid a penalty for that - getting our orders took months, and in addition to the $1.75 US they cost, we had to pay $3 for postage!

The thing is these were the flat "2-D" soldiers which you know, mostly were only fit for the sort of front line duty where artillery and mortar attacks were guaranteed! But yeah, you just knew that those soldiers were fresh from The 'Nam. and if you were wicked lucky your box might contain the six-man Tunnel Rat Set...

When the Gods were smiling on you, and you were amazingly wildly and inappropriately lucky, you'd find inside that wooden footlocker some of the Resistance Fighters, with their cool (but highly inappropriate at least today) captured German LMGs, or bundles of improvised explosives and TNT clutched in their little French hands!

The rarest of the rare were the Resistance Leader with captured Luger Pistol, and the one my best mate Mattie actually got: the super-uber-rare Resistance Fighters holding the classic pot-style round-style throwing bomb that he immediately colored in black marker to make it even more deadly.

The footlocker troops we ordered from the back of our favorite comics were naturally the troops that suffered severely from artillery and mortar fire (they were made of a brittle sort of plastic, so they dismembered in explosions really well...

Of course the artillery and mortar explosions that we gleefully simulated with the awesome Chinese fireworks my older brothers gave us tended to go through a LOT of troops. Yeah, the battles that were fought in my sandbox against the Japanese Imperial forces and their German allies were bloody, brutal, and loud!

After we outgrew Toy Soldier Gaming we naturally gravitated towards Scalextrics, but that's a fitting subject for some other WTG...

Get to the Point Kenneth!

So here is the thing... That rather lengthy and detailed description of old-school Toy Soldier Gaming? THAT is what the games in this series are meant to recreate! With any luck you have just vicariously experienced what gaming meant to your parents when THEY were kids.

Except you get to play with them over and over, without having to carefully wire the battlefield so you can set off your artillery and mortar shots remotely using a nail-board and electric model rocket fuses... And these games bring your troops to life, with attitude, weapons, and a willingness to die for their... Toy Box.

Yep, that pretty much sums up the first two games in the series!

And that is a good thing since, you know, they outlawed crackers back in the mid-80's so two entire generations of Aussie gamers were unable to know the joy of a massive battlefield on which 2D Imperial Japanese soldiers met the firm resistance - and Artillery Barrages - of loyal and brave ANZAC Diggers. We're just saying...

But wait, things get a LOT more interesting with the third game - this one - because in addition to removing the difficulty scheme and adding in a scenario-based mini-story, the Signal Studios wizards behind the game have taken what should by now be a well-developed formula and mated it with an entire collection of OTHER toys that, depending on how old you are, may also take you back down a nostalgia trail... Basically those are:

GI Joe Hero Duke

The GI Joe toy franchise arrived a bit later in Australia compared to elsewhere in the world, its introduction to Aussie kids being delayed until the early 1990's thanks in no small part to the fact that its naming convention is the direct product of pop-culture and the fact that in the last 100 years the most common names for men included Joe (short for Joseph).

Just to complete this train of thought, the official names for the GI Joe toy line of action figures were intentionally kept vague by toy maker Hasbro, whose representatives have actually gone on the record to explain all of this.

The idea being that they were meant to simply represent the typical male role for the four major branches of the U.S. Armed Services, and a token female position in case little sister also wanted to have a dolly to make war and scratch her cute little patriotic itch... Because why?

Because you know, everybody knows that first of all women don't game online; and second, that anyone claiming to be female in a game online is either (a) a man pretending to be a woman because they are confused about their own sexual and gender identity, or (b) a man pretending to be a woman to get you to help them and give them good loot.

Specifically Hasbro named the four primary male role model toys as Action Soldier (U.S. Army), Action Sailor (U.S. Navy), Action Pilot (USAF), Action Marine (USMC) and, once it became crystal clear that little Sissy pretty much insisted that she be included in the role model distribution for the new line, prompted Hasbro to create Action Nurse (US Army Reserves).

Outside of the USA then, what American kids knew as GI Joe kids in most of the rest of the world saw him as Action Man... Just Action Man.

When you think of GI Jane - if you think of her at all which you know, we sorta doubt unless you happen to BE a Grrl Gamer - try to think of her in her purely submissive and politically correct role as subservient member of the surgical team or wounded caregivers at a generic Mobile Army Surgical Hospital (or M*A*S*H Unit), umkay? Umkay!

Though we question the notion that any serving active-duty reserve, or retired soldier, sailor, or marine would have played with one of them since, let's be honest here, up until the 90's they were neither called or thought of as "action figures" mates - they were dolls.

Interestingly enough the use of the name "Joe" for the appropriate US military soldiers followed in much the same manner and effect as "Tommy" appears in British culture to ID their generic image of a soldier. In the UK the name "Tommy Atkins" was used as the default example name for filling in forms - hence its rapid and rather wide-scale adoption by military and civilian alike...

Oh and you know those totally sexist chauvinistic things that we said about women? We were just kidding. See GI Jane is just alright with me!

GI Joe Hero Cobra Enemy

The Cobra forces are basically the other side of the coin to GI Joe and Duke - that said though, after considerable play it turns out that Cobra is the strongest hero in the game with the most reach and effectiveness. We have to admit that came as something of a surprise, if not just because, you know, they are supposed to be the bad guy?

Still it is results we are most interested in, and not who has the best PR as a hero, so yeah, hey, when you make your serious challenge run through the game? Might want to think Cobra. Just saying.

He-Man Hero

First of all, He-Man is NOT butch. Okay maybe a little, but considering the moral message that he sends and the important life lessons (like not giving up and stuff) all in all He-Man was not really a bad choice for this game. Hero wise that is.

That said, he might just be a bad choice for the challenge run since He-Man and his forces lack the overall damage dealing capabilities of, well, almost all of the others!

Ezio Hero

If you are thinking that choosing Ezio will get you a whole collection of substandard aged and ineffective weapons to fight with, well, there you are right!

It is pretty clear that Ezio was included here almost totally for novelty effect - not as a true hero and contender. That noted, he is still a fun Hero to play through the game on if only because it makes it that much harder.

Wrapping This Up

That said though, it is highly unlikely that your memories of these toys will quite mesh realistically with the experience you are about to have with them! The reason for that is simple: the often sweet memories of your childhood toys? Yeah, they are about to go to war!

Huh. This trip down memory lane has really had an impact on us. In fact the entire Bullpen has turned to naming the things we miss from that golden era of real Toy Soldier Gaming, so just for fits and shiggles we thought we would go ahead and share our Top 5 childhood wants -- and don't you feel lucky?

• 5. Choo Choo Bars

• 4. Redskins

• 3. Bacon Sangers (Bacon Buttys to our Pommies)

• 2. Sunnyboy, Glugs, and Razz

• 1. Milkos

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