Thank you Insane Dreamers for sending us the review code!

Gummy Dummy Battles is a goofy battle sim that has many different wacky units to send into battle that you can use to beat the very large amount of levels with. It clearly took a lot of inspiration from Totally Accurate Battle Simulator, as it uses a similar concept of having the troops be physics based and giving them googly eyes. If you played TABS, then you may enjoy this game as well due to its similarity.

There are currently 2 ways to play the game: sandbox, and missions. The sandbox is pretty simple, as you have to choose a game mode, what the area your troops battle in will look like, and a few other settings such as the number of rounds or win conditions. There are quite a few game modes to choose from, such as two soccer-esc ones with an object you need to push into a goal, one where you score by getting units to enter a specific area, a king of the hill type thing where a team has to enter the other team's "base" and survive inside it, and many more. After choosing a mode, you then are able to place whatever units you’d like and then make them kill each other. It’s fairly simple. The missions mode brings you to a screen where you must pick a campaign to play through and beat all of the levels in. Currently, there are four campaigns with thirty levels each. The levels give you a 1-3 star rating depending on which difficulty you play them on (so easy gives you one, medium is two and hard is a perfect score). As far as I can tell, the only difference between the difficulties is the amount of starting cash it gives you, meaning that on harder difficulties you must place less powerful troops in order to win.

Since this is a battle simulator, there are various different categories of units that you can send into battle: valiant warriors, war beasts, killing machines, death from above, unconventional weapons, impregnable defenses, and politicians. All of these are as they sound, meaning that valiant warriors are average troops such as people with guns, bows, melee weapons, or even a giant comb. War beasts are basically just animals that may have some sort of ability, such as a goat that can charge after enemies to headbutt them or a pig with a bomb strapped to it. Killing machines are essentially vehicles with their own strengths and weaknesses such as cars, tanks, or people riding lawnmowers. Death from above is as expected: planes, drones, and balloons. Unconventional weapons are mythical creatures like trolls, zombies, or massive gingerbread men. Impregnable defenses are stationary things such as barricades, mines, or turrets. Politicians are completely pointless to use in battle, but they are just people who resemble various historical or current figures such as Trump, Lincoln, or Hitler. Some of the units are pointless in my opinion, but I appreciate the effort that the developer put in to make the game funny and lighthearted.

Battles are fairly simple, as all you need is at least one unit on each side, and you can start it. They will fight until the win condition is met, and the winner will be decided. During battles, you can possess a unit and fight as them instead of simply spectating. This is, unfortunately, the only way to beat some battles because the units will focus on fighting one another rather than completing whatever the win condition is (if it’s something other than killing everyone). For example, in the soccer mode it's very difficult to actually get something to happen if you don’t possess one of your units and attack the ball instead of the enemies. This is because units will focus more on fighting each other instead of trying to hit the ball. Something else thats interesting with the possession mechanic is that normal, unpossessed units bounce around and have their movements dependent on physics so that they jiggle around when they fight, however this does not happen with a unit you're controlling. When you're controlling one, it becomes a lot less animated than the other ones on the battlefield, and gains generic walking animations that just move the legs and bring you slowly forward rather than everyone else bouncing around and moving fast. Also, gravity seems to be a little different since you are constantly facing vertically when you jump or fly as opposed to the others actually being able to spin like that. You're also able to dodge many more attacks much easier than typical soldiers and will often be able to win battles a lot easier by controlling a ranged unit and just walking in circles to avoid everything.

Gummy Dummy Battles is fun, but not stable at all. Something contributing to this is the fact that it doesn’t seem completely finished in my opinion, as there are a few glitches that are very easy to activate and some break the game or make it too easy. In a game like this, I’m not surprised that occasionally a ragdoll will stretch itself out a lot when getting hit too hard or something like that, but this doesn’t break the game too much, as it’ll usually only last for a split second. Something I discovered right away upon playing the game that is entirely overpowered is the fact that you can duplicate cash that is used to place units, essentially giving you infinite money. This is executed by simply placing a unit and erasing it. It gives you back twice as much as the unit is worth, and it baffles me how this wasn’t discovered or fixed by the developer, since it’s a problem that seems easy to solve.

The graphics are not impressive, but get the job done for something like this. There are two songs that aren’t amazing but set the mood, and stock sound effects are used for basically everything. The controls aren’t amazing, but can be changed. The camera can be controlled by moving the mouse to one edge of the screen which tilts it in that direction, which seems useful in theory, but having multiple monitors makes it really annoying.

Morally, there aren’t too many issues with Gummy Dummy Battles. Of course it has violence, but that’s a given for a game like this. Blood is not present, but when something dies it shows a splatter of particles in whatever the color is of the team it was on. There is also a little bit of crude humor because you can place a poop mine with a fart attack.

Gummy Dummy Battles is an entertaining experience, but I feel really needs to have more work put into it. The developer seems to have put at least some care into making it, but I think there is a lot of potential and things that need to be done to it to fix its issues.