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Value
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| | Genre: Action | | | Min OS X: 10.4 |
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Click to enlarge
The first level of the story mode is probably the best bit - recreating the start of the movie |
Bizarrely, the developers didn’t choose to include that feature in the toy box mode, and knowing what to do is not always obvious. Despite that (or because of it), the free roaming section of the game is almost certainly the better half of the game. Whilst a great deal of time is spent performing fairly repetitive and meaningless tasks, like hunting out outfits for the ‘townspeople’ or even for their buildings, there are some really good bits, like the hot-wheels inspired car levels or the way you can ride around on Bullseye to survey your land. It is effectively a toy version of Grand Theft Auto – you perform missions to earn cash, use cash to buy new toys and use the new toys to get more missions. For children it hints at what a Toy Story game should be – it is a chance to roam about doing whatever you like, dressing up aliens as barbers and then kicking them across the map, throwing around paratroopers, climbing up stuff and jumping off and so on.Unfortunately however, they didn’t push the concept anywhere near far enough. Dressing up toys and buildings is about the limit of what can actually be done creatively, and even once everything is unlocked the game world is still frustratingly tiny as well as divided up by loading screens. The scope for exploration is essentially non-existent, and so the ‘free roaming’ quickly deteriorates into little more than choosing the order in which you play each part of the game – do you do the races and then Zurg’s fortress? Or do you go to the (god-awful) polly-pocket-esque fantasy land first? Large portions are repetitive or simply incredibly boring – throwing one plastic soldier parachutist onto a target is kind of cool, throwing twenty isn’t. The much advertised customization is a gimmick; ostensibly it offers the sort of freedom to make your play area in the style of the Sims but in fact it mostly only lets you change the colours of things, and I can’t actually imagine that many children would care. The one customization from the movie that I would actually have liked to be able to make – turning Buzz into Spanish Buzz – is, as far as I could tell, completely absent. As for the practical stuff, the game runs smoothly, and although the graphics are fairly mediocre, the characters are well rendered. Another positive is that the game is accessible on a wide variety of systems. For $30 I wouldn’t exactly recommend it as good value, but given the paucity of great alternatives on the Mac I wouldn’t necessarily dismiss it completely either. Children probably will enjoy this game, especially if they loved the movie, but I couldn’t help but think that it would be better just to spend the money on actual toys. Ultimately, Toy Story 3 is effectively a half-hearted video game simulation of a toy world – and simulating playing with toys for children seems about as pointless as simulating going to work for adults. This game is a badly made toy of a toy, but it does at least have good characters, occasional flickers of fun and the developers have at least made some effort to make more than a linear recreation of the movie. As movie tie-ins for children go, it’s far from the worst ever to be foisted on unwary parents. That’s a low target to hit however. After watching Toy Story 3, many of my friends professed to being brought almost to tears. This game’s one success is that it just about manages to avoid that.
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