Tiny Troopers Joint Ops

Game Info

Twin-stick shooters and war games have been a popular combination ever since Ikari Warriors arrived in arcades in the 80s (though technically, it only had one ‘stick’).  The latest entry in this game type is Tiny Troopers Joint Ops, which is a combination of two previously released mobile games bearing the Tiny Troopers name.

Tiny Troopers Joint Ops has you taking command of up to three soldiers at a time as you complete various missions from a top-down somewhat isometric point of view.  As you complete these missions and kill the bad guys, you can earn command points to upgrade your weapons and armor.  Missions have a wide variety of end goals, like rescuing captured prisoners, protecting photographers, or blowing up all the enemy buildings.  Most sections have a decent size map to run around in and explore for dog tags and medals, the later of which are used to revive killed teammates or unlock new soldier aids.  The combat is pretty fun for the most part, as you shoot your gun with the right analog stick and drag & drop grenades, rocket launchers and air strikes.  These aren’t given out all that often, so when you find them, cherish them.  There is some kind of auto-aim feature when using your gun, so your shots don’t always go exactly where you are pointing. The heavy weapons are more precise, as you drag the icon of choice to the place of impact.  Movement with the left analog stick is smooth, but I did get caught in the scenery a few times, when a hill I thought I could go down had other ideas.  Only rapid spamming of the stop, drop & roll button freed me from these predicaments.

It is quite fun running around the map looking for enemy soldiers to shoot.  Some of the sections can get quite tough and you’ll be moving around constantly.  The pacing & momentum slows down when you get to some of the buildings if you don’t have the big artillery with you to take them out fast.  There are also no checkpoints anywhere on the maps, so if you fail a level, it’s back to front for you.  And if you don’t have enough medals collected to revive your fallen comrade, you lose some of the experience and extra HP they’ve earned and have to start with a new recruit.  You can definitely see remnants of the mobile origins here, as the medals screamed “micro-transaction power-up currency for the impatient” to me.  Sure enough, when I downloaded the original games on my iPhone, there were the offers to buy the medals, along with command points.  While I like the idea of losing progress of a soldier if he gets killed in action, I don’t like that you need to use finite resources in the game to revive them, since once you’ve collected the one to three medals in each stage, they’re gone for good.  Also leftover from the mobile transition are touch controls.  You can touch the Vita screen where you want your soldier to move or aim along with the aforementioned heavy weapon deployment.  A minor annoyance here is that you need to use touch to navigate the menus before you get into a game.  It’s one of my biggest pet peeves to not be able to use physical buttons to navigate menus, and it’s present here.

There aren’t really any major differences between the original set of levels and the Special Ops set.  The only change in the level missions I could tell is that you get to ride in the back of a jeep manning the gun while a buddy drives you on rails for a few missions.  Those new missions types are fun, but I would have liked to see more of this kind of variety brought to the table for a mission set requiring its own menu option.  In addition to the 50-something regular mission maps, you can mix things up further with zombie levels, because what would a war game nowadays be without zombies.  The mission in these maps is to survive as long as possible while wave after wave of brain-eaters rambles towards you.  Once in a while you’ll get to add squad mates or an airdrop will give you some much-needed rockets.  These levels were the most fun for me and have a replayability to see how far you can get.  Online leaderboards are also here to help remind you that other people are better at games than you.

Graphically it looks decent.  Characters are smallish, so there’s not a whole lot of detail there.  Scenery and fiery explosions look good.  It all has the typical drab war motif going on, which is expected.  The characters have a kind of bigheaded cutesy look to them, but it doesn’t distract from the game while you’re playing.  In between main section comic style cut-scenes go on a little too long for my tastes with their forgettable story, but it’s not too bad.  The music is general military filler with lots of snare rolls and horns.  Sound effects during the game are well done as well as most of the voice acting, though they get higher pitched in the game versus in cut-scenes.

THE RECOMMENDATION

If you need a top-down run-n-gun war game, Tiny Troopers can scratch that itch.  There’s a good amount of content, and the zombie rush mode will bring you back after completing all the campaign levels.  It’s not going to set the world on fire with its lack of mission variety, but I enjoyed the time I spent with the game.  Despite a few annoyances, the game is fun in small doses and worth taking a look at.