One of the great things about writing for a website that really leans into its niche is that it gives me a great excuse to go out and try some games that I might never have otherwise tried. While browsing a recent TurnBasedThursday thread one particular release caught my eye, Bedroom Battlegrounds. Released to Steam on the 18th November, Bedroom Battlegrounds is the first game release from developer WCHC and promises a turn-based military experience confined entirely to a single room.
Maybe this premise and art gives you a similar feeling as it did for me, a fondness of the days growing up spent playing with toy soldiers. Setting them precariously around the house in order to let your imagination take over. Cupboards became critical vantage points; chair legs provided some much-needed ground cover as soldiers fought to “claim” whatever valuable could be found.
On occasion, I may have even sent my brave men into battle on the back of my beloved childhood dog, what he lacked in tactical prowess he made up for with speed. The question is if Bedroom Battlegrounds can evoke that feeling of nostalgia and deliver a strategy experience worth your time.
Overview
Bedroom Battlegrounds launches with a tutorial to help you learn the ropes as well as 3 household locations to which you can take the fight. These territorial toys simply can’t be contained to the children’s bedroom so your battles may spill over into the master bedroom or the studio. Within each map, you will be fighting to either destroy your opponent’s base or, in the case of the master bedroom, hold onto an objective located on the far side of the room. Scattered around each map will be additional objectives you can hold to generate extra gold, allowing you to slowly produce more troops than your opponent and helping spread the fight across the room.
Given this game is relatively small in scale I am going to review it slightly differently. There is no story here to unpick or deep mechanics to analyse so we’ll cover an overview of the available content, highlight the strengths as well as areas to improve so you can decide if this is a developer you want to show your support for.
On each turn, you can use your gold to produce units from the 3 structures that compose your base: either infantry, engineers/vehicles, or medics. Now you have got some troops, and it’s time to get fighting. The game is an entirely turn-based affair, with each unit having a set amount of energy and recovering some of it each turn. This energy is used for both movement and attacking, so if you plan to run your troops across the room as quickly as possible, you may find they lose their capability to fight.
In order to really build that childhood warfare theme, unit movement is not limited by forces such as gravity, your soldiers are being lifted by the strength of whatever child happens to be playing with them. This allows you to use verticality to your advantage, lifting soldiers onto the bed for a vantage point, as long as they have a place to stand when they arrive. Of course defying gravity is a tiring job so expect a vertical move to deplete your energy as much as a long run.
Excess energy is needed to shoot at a target or knife it if it is close enough. Of course, there is a little more to it than that. Snipers hit harder at range but are more fragile. Rockets can be used to take out groups of enemies…you know, the drill when it comes to conventional weapons. To be clear, this is no XCOM, no percent chance to hit. If you are in the range of someone, have a line of sight, and have the energy to fire, you’ll score a hit. It’s also a game of almost perfect information, you can see all units and both sides have access to the same roster.
This leads to it being a title that you ideally want to play as a local multiplayer experience, specifically with that one troublesome sibling you fought with growing up for maximum effect. There are no online matches as it stands but the game does work fine with Steam’s Remote Play functionality allowing you to draft a friend into the experience with only one copy of the game.
So What Does It Do Well?
To start with, it nails the vibe it’s going for. As a general rule I am really not a fan of the low poly “blocky” graphics style that has come to be associated with games like Roblox but I can give it a pass in this case. It gives the soldiers a toy-like feeling, which is further reinforced by the god hand used to pick your brave soldiers up and move them across the floor.
This pairs beautifully with the slightly janky physics that allows you to throw units around or awkwardly balance them on uneven household objects. It gives a great sense of scale and replicates the feeling of turning household objects into a battle site. I find it especially endearing how units behave when hit with explosions, toppling over as if they had just been knocked with the frustrated swipe of a hand.
The energy system also allows for some fairly tactical choices around unit control. Do you want to stick to minimal movements and conserve your energy if the opponent chooses to advance? Or use it all to reduce their numbers before they can counterattack? The fact that many units require more than one turn’s worth of energy to take an action encourages players to think ahead.
It also promotes the use of transport vehicles, which can deliver soldiers with all their energy to key points to take out any aggressors. Using the same units will also increase their cost, encouraging players to use the game’s roster. We all know how annoying it can be to face an opponent who just spams a single strong unit.
I also like that the two maps that require you to simply kill your opponent have optional objectives to hold on bookshelves and similar. The idea of fighting “up” pieces of furniture really separates toy soldiers from more traditional battle maps and plays into the sense of scale. Bedroom Battlegrounds also allows you to customize the game parameters, so if you want to grab a friend and play out a game where you can both just churn out units or increase the value of some of the optional points, then that option is absolutely there for you. It’s not quite a sandbox, but maybe a toy box would be more relevant anyway.
Where Does It Need Improvement?
The main thing to overcome is the lack of a campaign combined with an AI, which is not a huge challenge for the player. I mentioned earlier that this is almost certainly a game to play in local multiplayer, and it became clear after a few sessions that this was the case. If you want to play the game as more of a creative title and line all the bookshelves with snipers as you push under the desk with tanks, there is some fun to be had; just don’t expect the AI to do a great job of countering you.
There are also a lot of signs of it being a smaller project. The UI also feels rather basic and simultaneously shows too much and too little information. I don’t really need to know the kill count of my barracks considering its inability to attack, but it would be useful to know how much my damage is reduced when shooting at a vehicle, as an example.
Overall some little usability touches would really go a long way to improving this title. Additional objectives aren’t marked particularly clearly and soldiers have a large dome indicating where they can move/fire but it doesn’t indicate to you that they have a visual arc in front of them where they can shoot initially leading me to waste additional energy trying to rotate them to face the enemy. You will find yourself fighting for a short while to understand the systems at play before you can get into it.
I would also love to see a slight expansion of the roster/abilities. There are a relatively small number of units, 10 in total, and while I do appreciate that these all serve distinct roles and come with additional abilities, it felt very underwhelming to realize my armored personnel carrier’s cannon was the same damage and effect as my rifleman’s M16. The developer has been receptive to feedback, and a number of further issues I had with the title were fixed over the course of my writing this review. Hopefully, it will continue to be iterated because I would love to see more great titles that let us play toy soldiers.
Final Thoughts
Bedroom Battlegrounds certainly invoked the intended feelings of nostalgia in me. A time machine back to far simpler days of fighting imaginary wars across the house. Yet, as with any game of toy soldiers, I have to recommend that you play this with an equally imaginative friend to get the full enjoyment out of it. The solo experience may leave you longing for a worthy opponent to test your skills against.
If you do manage to find that person there is definitely some enjoyment to be had here. It’s a title where you really could have more fun making up scenarios within its maps and playing them out with a fellow commander. Rather than simply fighting over the objectives that each room lays out for you, maybe you just want to fill the shelves with as many snipers as possible or push a tank battalion through a gap in the furniture. Thankfully, with the inclusion of remote play, you only need one copy to be able to grab a friend and jump into the fight. I look forward to seeing where WCHC goes next in its game development journey.
The developer kindly provided the game key for this review
