Full-featured 3D tower defense games are pretty rare, but if that’s your genre of choice you should go ahead and check out the demo for Toy Shire that released just last week. In Toy Shire you’re a kid whose toys are at war with each other, as your brand new green army men battle the old waves or robots, dinosaurs, and the like determined to keep their place as the toys of choice.

The demo is three levels long and features gun, cannon, and mortar towers alongside RTS-style troops to command wielding rifles, grenades, marksman rifles, and machine guns. They’re all set up to defend tower defense lanes marked out with stuff like wooden blocks and plastic LEGO-style bricks.

The real draw here is that it just looks pretty dang good for a tower defense, and the perspective of a kid looking down on his toys is a nice change of pace. New units and towers are placed down by hand—literally—as the kid leans in to drop them on the field. That also swings your camera down into the action, since you’re seeing everything from the kid’s point of view.

The demo’s pretty short, but sweet enough, showing off a decent variety of speeds and abilities in your robotic enemies. The final level was even surprising enough that it took me a couple shots to beat—nice to see and bodes well for a final game that takes off the kid gloves, if you’ll forgive the pun. I wasn’t entirely sold on the RTS-style troops, however—they felt a bit too fragile compared to investing your earned resources in permanent upgrades on your towers.

You can free demo Toy Shire: Room One on Steam alongside the page for Toy Shire proper. Toy Shire is developed by Bluespy Studios and published by Catropic Games, and it’s set to release between April and June of 2024.