Games worth discovering

Small in Size and Scope but Large in Heart - Tiny Review

4K View2022-10-05

When you think of strategic military games, you probably imagine something like Rainbow Six—big, bombastic, loud. Full of explosions and action. Tense, edge-of-your-seat operations with major implications. Chaos.

To the credit of Tiny, it features more of those elements than I expected from its title and its look. Though it has a cute paper cutout aesthetic, this game provides plenty of intense shoot-outs and challenging objectives that you can approach from multiple angles. And explosions. There are lots of explosions.

Tiny places you as the newest member of the titular Tiny Squad, a group of globe-trotting military operators who don’t appear to have any national affiliation yet go on missions around the world with impunity. My adventures took me to such diverse locales as Romania, France, China, and even my current home of Minneapolis, Minnesota. Wherever I went, though, the missions were largely the same: infiltrate a building (or a series of buildings), avoid traps, take out enemy mercenaries, and finally defuse a bomb. The action moves fast, and most of my missions were completed in five minutes at most.

While there’s no real variety in objectives, Tiny does offer multiple viable approaches for accomplishing your goals. As I progressed through missions, I was able to recruit allies who had their own special abilities. The best of these for my play style was Brick, a beefy, sledgehammer-wielding fellow who had the power to slam through walls, creating paths where they didn’t exist before. If you’re into the more subtle approach, you might prefer teaming up with Prime, a partner who excels at recon work and can help you recognize deadly mines and lasers installed around enemy bases. Levels aren’t massive, but you also aren’t funneled down a straight line; you have the freedom to choose how you approach things.

Tiny employs a similarly open-ended progression structure that made the levels all start blending together before long, despite the freedom of approach on display. Rather than a single, straightforward narrative, the game provides a new “operation” every day. An operation is a series of connected levels. You’re generally given a choice between one of two levels on each step of the operation, and your choice will determine a bonus you get for the rest of that operation—whether that’s a passive upgrade, such as improved aim or reduced damage from enemy bullets, or a more gameplay-altering change such as unlocking one of the aforementioned allies to join you on the rest of the levels.

These daily operations play out as a roguelite of sorts. That is, your current health level and upgrades carry over to each subsequent level of the operation, but once you leave (er, “tactically retreat”) or are killed, you lose all those upgrades and have to begin the operation over again from the start. As you down enemies and defuse bombs, you’ll collect credits; the deeper you get into an operation, the more credits you’ll bank, but if you die you’ll lose most of them. Thankfully, though, you can keep running the day’s current operation as often as you’d like.

The risk-reward tension feels smart, and I was forced to make tough choices, but a lot of the time the tough choice that I went with was, well, giving up on the operation and taking my winnings. Once I was back at the base, I could spend the credits to unlock new weapons and allies or to purchase permanent passive upgrades for my character such as higher base health to help make future runs more successful.

This cycle of challenging runs and slow permanent growth is one I’m very familiar with from roguelites, but it feels a little bit...tiny here. No, really! There are less upgrades to buy than I expected, and most of them feel very uninspired. Though I haven’t yet maxed out my character, it doesn’t feel like it will take too much longer to get there if I stick with the game.

I also wasn’t sure that I understood the reason for operations being on a daily rotation, as they don’t really feel different enough to warrant it. I’m not totally certain if levels are procedurally generated, but they at least feel that way. As far as I experienced, at least, new operations didn’t really lead to new twists in gameplay or new challenges; it was just the same stuff over and over under different names.

The saving grace for Tiny, however, is that the moment-to-moment gameplay in these repetitive missions feels really excellent. The game’s levels are fully destructible, so I really felt powerful and as though I was able to cause a lot of very satisfying chaos. And the simple shooting gameplay felt like a just slightly slower-paced, less demanding take on something like Hotline Miami. I never grew tired of kicking open a door and blasting away the startled guards on the other side before they could react.

I should mention that there’s also a very strange overarching story to Tiny that you piece together by picking up cryptic tidbits of lore hidden throughout missions. I was pulled in by the curious story being woven about this world, but I also had trouble understanding how a lot of its individual pieces fit together, given that I unlocked them in like twenty-word chunks, seemingly at random. I’d like to see the full plot laid out to try to unravel the strange conspiracies at the heart of this world, but I’m not sure how long that will take or if this game really has that staying power for me.

And that’s really the core of my feelings about Tiny. It’s a fun enough game and certainly not bad by any stretch. But at its very core, it’s structured as something that wants its players to log in every day and play a little bit, and I’m not convinced there’s enough depth here to really earn that for many players. Given that it is genuinely free-to-play, though, I’d say it’s worth taking a shot for yourself and seeing if it clicks for you.

SCORE: 3 STARS OUT OF 5

PLAY IF YOU LIKE:

• The roguelite approach to game design. If you enjoy slowly building up resources and spending them to supply your character with permanent upgrades, you’ll probably get some enjoyment out of Tiny for at least a little bit.

• The destructive and unquestioned adventurism of American foreign policy. To be clear, there’s nothing I saw in the game suggesting that Tiny Squad is part of America’s armed forces specifically...but they sure buzz around the world, blowing stuff up and causing chaos as if they were! If you can’t get enough of unilaterally barging your way into nominally independent countries to enforce law and order by way of guns, check this out!

💬 Have you played Tiny? What do you think of it? And if not, let me know if you have any personal favorite military games that take a different perspective. Leave a comment below!

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