I haven’t had a chance to play the full version, for reasons I’ll go into later, yet the demo speaks tomes for the quality f feel, immersion, and gameplay.

This game is what Battle Chess was to my generation, taking something socially awkward yet addictive and utilising technology to make it kick arse! Set at the commencement of World War I, battles are fought on a table top with toy soldiers between the Allied Nations and Central Powers of the Kaiser.

The models are amazingly rendered in full corny post-30′s toy soldier grotesque. The grainy film projector feel video mixed with the lofi records playing in the background of WWI era music.

On commencement of the demo you get to see the boxes of your toy soldiers, base defence units, and your snazzy red baron tri-plane ‘with over 200 parts!’ The pieces you ‘play’ on the Battlefield are rather autonomous, you earn cash to upgrade and repair units by destroying your opponents units in a tower / base defence fashion–albeit with a solid 3D feel and full camera control–with an ability to micro manage units.

Whether you choose to fly planes, use ‘shell-cam’ to manually guide in an arty shell, or even camp at your base and snipe from the sniper tower it’s addictive stuff! Before you know it you’re in the midst of battle, upgrading units, taking on manual aiming of units, and poof before you known it you’ve unlocked a few avatar rewards.

Now if only you’ll ‘unlock the full version for 1,200 Microsoft points.’ That translates to ‘If you buy this game for $20 odd bucks we’ll give you a gas mask for your avatar.’ in MS brainwashing terms used to make you feel detached from the fiscal costs and thus desensitize you to buying crap and impulse purchasing.

Marketing wank aside, the other downside is the fact there’s only 200 gamer points in it; I won’t play a game with anything under 1,000 GP; reason being I’ve had some smaller buggier Xbox Arcade games flip their shit and glitch never awarding the measley few GP they should.

If it had 1KGP I’d be all for it, but to those willing to blow $20-30 on it you won’t be disappointed at all; it really is cute, novel, and brilliant!

Tentative 8/10, add more GP and it’d be a 9! (10′s reserved for 9′s with pre-requisite zombie plague related content only.)

Post-script: I bought it, it’s cute. Tower defence sums it up well, addictive but not very expansive and it’s replayability is low with it’s network play being excessively unlikely to get much use as it’s not a kickin’ rad game like BC2 or L4D2 or some such. (Protip: L4D2 AU edition still doesn’t really work, not detecting any online games .. ever. :(