World War Toons is a First Person Shooter release by Roqovan Studios, a rebrand of Reload Studio. Being free to play, it is one of the most anticipated games for the Playstation VR and has a lot to live up to plus the amount of advertising done by Playstation themselves. I will talk about the overall of the game before diving into the VR aspect as this is one game that allows you to play both with or without the PSVR.
World War Toons versus Call of Duty or Battlefield is like comparing Mario Kart to Gran Turismo or Forza. Even if they are in the same genre, the general tone is all different. So comparing World War Toons to other shooters is a bit of a no no.
Visuals
Being a comical FPS, the visual fit the game perfectly. The animations of seeing a soldier being shot at is funny to see. Certain nice touches like when a person is turning white means he is about to die gives a sort of a life bar indication. The maps are model nicely and I could find little fault with any of the graphics. There might need a few UI adjustments in the map and character view and those we will discuss in depth more in this review.
Audio
The audio used in the game is good with the soldier saying to weapons firing. The only issue is the audio bug which happens sometimes which make some of the volume between sound clips sometimes sound louder or softer.
Gameplay
Being a First Person Shooter, some people will feel familiar already with the controls of the game. The movement of your character is good but the aiming with the controller need some getting used to. Tuning up the sensitive of your aiming will leave you weird acceleration of your aim. The movement of the character is slow and is you enable sprint, it move a little faster but the speed between sprinting and strafing is different and need time getting used to. Also this in this game, your health does not regenerate so, the only way to health is to kill pigs or chicken around the map or from a soldier with a picnic basket.
There is no jumping in this game, but these jump pads helps you fly across the map.
Different classes have different weapons and abilities. Abilities are activated by pressing Circle on the controller and can vary from dropping food to heal or rocket jumping. These are all unique and fun to play with and well balanced if I might add. There are a few issues with the weapons like how weapons cannot be reloaded (No reload button) or there is no ammo count UI. This makes enemy encounter sometimes hard as you have to finish all you ammo before you reload not knowing how many you have left. There are also Mystery Boxes around the map which give power up from falling piano to a rocket you can ride.
Mystery Box will give a random powerup
It is also a weird thing able to shoot while sprinting and as far as I can tell, sprinting has no disadvantage beside the weird speed difference when you strafe. The only reason I can think off not to sprint is to avoid the sound bug which makes the loud exhaustion sound of your soldier while you are sprinting. The exhaustion sound bug makes the sound louder than the sound of your gun being fired sometimes and it gets a little irritating.
There is a meter which fills up as time go by or while getting points. When the meter is full, pressing Triangle on the controller will turn you into a tank with more health and cannon which can one shot people if you get a direct hit. This is all great but could use a little polish like adding a transforming animation in first person view because currently your first person view is empty while you cannot move during the transformation.
UI (User Interface)
User Interface in this game need a overhaul. There are certain bugs and things which I think should be added. For example, during character select, no indication that you have to select using the circle and sometime the circle fills up fast and you are stuck with a random class. As mention above there is no ammo count on weapons and no way to properly keep score of what is happening around the map. There is also no minimap in this game which may cause confusions to newcomers because of the different maps and also objectives. There is a arrow which points to the objectives but it does not explain what to do. There are indicators in the middle that shows your health, ability cooldown and your tank cooldown. It is still too soon to say if the minimal UI will become set in the final version or improvement is on the way but somehow it feels something needs to change.
The character select screen with 4 classes to select from.
Maps and Gamemode
There are currently 4 maps available each with different objective
1) Moulah Rose – A Free for all map
2) Sacre Blue – A Team Deathmatch Map
3) Pyramid Scheme – Capture the Flag gamestyle
4) Dread Zepplin – Single Point Control Map
Each map has great detail to them and looks fine. There is somehow the lack of map explanation to newcomers and a minimap to navigate around the area. I hope these item will be improved and or a ingame tutorial besides watching YouTube videos from the official website.
PSVR
PSVR is available for this game and lets the user choose between playing normally or in VR. Make no mistake, this game was meant to be played with VR. The artsytle compliments the reduce resolution of PSVR and manage to still make the game look pretty. Some extra stuff like looking around in the plane during the lobby is placed there to make you feel more immerse. During gameplay the control changes to aiming using your view. There are a lot of control schemes and some players may want to try them all before playing for long to counter motion sickness that may happen in PSVR. There is an advanatage of better aiming with the PSVR headset but downside is currently there is no sprint function if you play with VR, which hopefully will be fix in future patches.
Before the game begins, you are able to select between normal or PSVR gameplay
Crates & Gold Earning
Crates are available to be purchase at the store
This game has loot crates which require in-game currently or real cash (Loonies) to purchase. Inside the crates you have a chance to get character,skin or weapons mods. There are three types or crates, Private, Sargent, and Major which is priced from 1000, 3000, to 5000 gold or 200, 600, 1000 Loonies respectively. More expensive crates grantees better items. Gold are earn by completing dailies which give 3 task earning 100-300 gold or by winning a game which earns 30 gold. The progression for gold is slow without dailies but some dailies are hard to accomplish because of the map randomness and also if you disconnect during the game, everything you done in the match won’t count into the dailies.
Characters skin can be change before game start.
Weapon Mods
Each class weapons will have mods which can be gain from crates. Mods can range from reducing abilities cooldown or increasing damage. To equip mods, players must level a class to a certain level to unlock slots. A weapon can have up to 5 mod slots each unlocking every 5 level. At max level a class can have up to 5 mods.
Weapon mods give increase stats.
Pay-2-Win?
This causes issues with the in-game shop. Seeing as powerful mods are rare and the only way to get them is by buying crates, this may cause some balancing issues and also deter new players from playing the game when higher level which has better mods dominate the game play. True that with enough grinding a player can catch up but the slight thought of using cash to gain an advantage is like toxic to certain players. Unlike Overwatch where the purchase items are only cosmetics, these items can have in-game impact. How this game will balance around it or change, we will see.
Conclusion
World War Toons is one of the most refreshing First Person Shooters in the market today. The thought of it being free to play makes it even better. With a great amount of First Person Shooter out there, it will be a long road for this game but with good player feedbacks and improvement to the gameplay system, it can be a successful game which caters for all age group, young to old. Also it works with VR which is a great plus.
*Noted. The game is downloaded using Region 1 PSN account and has some network issues for South East Asian players. There was a lot of instants of getting kicked out of game and also character not spawning for a long time.
Short Video Gameplay
