Tiny Troopers is a top-down, twin stick arcade shooter with strong strategic elements blended in. The premise is serviceable — your troops are fighting the good fight against a massive enemy force. Like most games from the mobile world, you aren’t playing for story, even though there is a story and a few named and persistent characters, with basic cutscenes in between chapters. These are welcomed, and provide a more robust experience, but you can also completely ignore them and not miss a beat. The real reason to play is for quick diversions that are convenient, satisfying in short bursts, and more or less ‘casual’ in nature. Tiny Troopers fits this description fine, but it’s also pretty addictive, and it can be challenging, too. There are 50+ missions between the two campaigns, i.e. Soldier campaign and Special Ops campaign, as well as an all new Zombie Survival mode that has a basic online leaderboard system.
Regardless of mode or difficulty level, the goal is simple — shoot to kill, and complete the missions to unlock more of them. Before diving in, check out the brief but helpful tutorial mode that you can go back to at anytime from the main menu. Doing so not only nets you one of the easiest Trophies you’ll ever earn, but it lets you know pretty much everything you need to play. This is especially helpful for playing on the Vita as the Tutorial goes over the touch controls, which are intuitive, but worth learning. Anyway, once you’re comfortable with that (i.e. two minutes later), both the Soldier and Spec Ops campaigns are open to you. The Solider campaign contains three chapters and the Spec Ops has four. You must clear the missions in the order of their number to advance. Each mission has a primary objective, usually an optional one too. The maps are all small and basic, and it’s worthwhile to “find the edges” of the maps in order to locate collectibles and earn extra Command Points.
Collectibles include Medals, missions generally have anywhere from 0 to 3 of these to find. Medals are important; you need them to resurrect fallen Troops at the end of missions or to unlock new Specialists that you can then spend Command Points to hire. Troops earn higher ranks as they survive from mission to mission, which makes them more resilient. Should you have a favorite Trooper fall in battle, you can spend Medals to revive them at the end of the mission, but if you don’t have enough at that time you’re out of luck. Note too that, once a mission starts, there is no mission restart; you can abort it and retry it as many times as you like, but if your favorite Trooper dies, you can’t just quit out and restart, which I thought was interesting. Still, while ranked Troopers are nice to have, no character is ever significant enough to become very invested in. That said, you can purchase an Intel Pack during the mission for several thousand Command Points that marks all enemies and Medals on the map, and you can also purchase an upgrade to give new soldiers a higher starting rank (instead of starting at the lowest rank).
To finish up on that thought about Collectibles, there are also dog tags and Murphy’s Combat Quotes to find. There are ninety-three Medals, twenty-eight Quotes (I believe these are all in the Spec Ops Campaign) and I’m not sure how many dog tags there are, but these give you 250 Command Points each. Command Points are used to order supply drops during a mission, such as a health pack, air strike, grenades, and so on. I didn’t find these necessary until about a third of the way into the second chapter of the Soldier campaign — at that point, playing on medium or hard difficulty started becoming more of a challenge and in-mission supplies were necessary. Other than that expense, Command Points are used to purchase upgrades, which you will do pretty often, usually every other mission or so you have enough funds to spend. Upgrades are split into three categories: Weapons, BDUs, and Specialists. Within Weapon upgrades are more categories, and these can each be upgraded five times. Available upgrades include rate of fire, range, damage, accuracy, as well as increasing the speed of your troops and giving them a higher starting rank. BDUs are partly just for looks, but there are a couple of dozen of these to choose from. Most BDUs also give boosts, like increased HP or reducing the enemy’s ability to detect you. Finally, Specialists are purchased for the upcoming mission — these include Flamethrowers, Grenadiers, Medics, and hell even a member of Delta Force that can all in airstrikes.
So what’s the in-game action like? Well, it’s pretty basic, but strategy becomes vital entering that third hour or so, at which point you’re about halfway through the game. By this time, expect tougher enemies and more vehicles to deal with. There are plenty of enemy types and structures (some of which don’t shoot back, but most do), including rookies, elites, tanks, generals, snipers, technicals, barracks, and chemical containers to name most of them. Moving and shooting — i.e., the twin stick shooting gameplay — is what it’s all about. Knowing when to spend points for supplies or when to use your precious grenades, rockets, and air strikes is something you learn as you go. A mini-map might have been a plus, but as is you just have to press X to pull up the map. At a glance you can see where you are and where you need to go (and with an Intel Pack purchased, what you might want to check out along the way). Levels are small enough that you won’t need a map to avoid being lost. You’ll obviously encounter plenty of resistance, and the enemy is certainly more about quantity than quality. AI is extremely basic, on both sides of the barrel for that matter. On a few minor occasions, my troops had some path-finding issues or they got split apart by two going on way around an object and the third went another way. This isn’t a common problem, but I made a note of it.
Upon mission’s end, a summary screen tallies up your results. Points for completing the mission for the first time gets awarded, as does clearing the objectives. There’s also a camo bonus for “stealth” play. You can also view all time stats from the main menu, which includes lifetime Command Point totals, collectibles status, number of each type of enemy killed, number of friendly prisoners killed, and your troops’ all time kill stats, too.
You can replay missions on different difficulty levels for more points or to find any Medals you might have missed, but instead of spending much time at all doing that I recommend playing the new Zombie Survival mode. Each chapter has such a mode, and you need a certain number of ‘bullets’ to access it. The bullets are just an indicator of the difficulty level; one bullet is easy, two is medium, three is hard, and so if you need 6 bullets, you can get that through completing 6 easy missions, or two on hard, for example. Once in the Zombie mode, you begin with a single Specialist that you control. As you clear Waves, you can get other Specialists to join you simply by walking up to them. You can really rack up a lot of Command Points here to spend in the regular missions.
As far as presentation, well, it’s not great, but it’s serviceable. Keep in mind this is an $8 Cross-Buy and it was previously a popular mobile game, so it’s not exactly going to stress your platform’s hardware. Most missions lack music, which is too bad, and the repetitive sound of the gunfire gets old, but for playing in short bursts, which this game is intended for, it’s entirely manageable. Graphically, again it’s serviceable, but nothing to write home about.
With that, let’s get to the summary…