Genre: Third-Person Action Adventure Publisher: Disney Interactive Developer: Avalanche Software Players: 1-2
By Keith B (16th Jul 2010)
By smashing one of the world’s biggest videogame assumptions to pieces, Toy Story 3 has earned our respect.
If you play games a lot, and if you’re reading this then I expect you do, then you’ll no doubt be familiar with some of these statements: “RTS games will always be better on PC than consoles because you need so many buttons to make a citizen harvest grain like a mouse and keyboard”; “FPS will always be better on a PC” because of the same mouse and keyboard argument; “Nothing shows how much we’ve learned and grown since (ANY GAME) was released than a sequel!”; “Games based on movies will be terrible, no question”.
Well, for the first time, certainly in my experience, I’ve played a game based on a movie that isn’t destined to slip around the U-bend of mediocrity before it even hits the shelves. Unlike the pitiful Iron Man 2 game, which was never the recipient of a single unique idea or feature, Toy Story 3 bursts to life on your TV displaying the same sort of production values that the movies themselves possess. This is a perfectly rendered, voiced and realised virtual world where the player gets to run riot with all manner of toys.
The game falls into two distinct categories – a variety of usually-platform levels, based on the Toy Story movies, and then the sandbox area that provides all the fun once the ‘story’ missions are completed. The story missions follow the most recent movie relatively closely and see the player rotating control between the main characters. They are entirely kid friendly, and offer two player action that delivers better than most other games manage. Each of these missions typically involve completing a series of objectives in one or two rooms, where the player hunts for masses of hidden cards and items as they complete the set challenges. Collection is a key part of the game, intended to be a driving force to get up to those hard to reach places in pursuit of gold coins and wardrobe items.
Essentially a third person platformer, Toy Story 3 straddles the line between appealing to young kids who don’t understand games and those seasoned veterans of the industry. The jumping can be challenging but the game never gives you the two fingers when you fall to your doom, instead depositing you back in the game world immediately before you perished. Through this continual encouragement gamers are guided through the story.
The eight missions that form the campaign are brief but intensely enjoyable. While most of it is the aforementioned third person platformer, there are on-rails shooter sections thrown in, and a nifty level where the player must switch between three characters to traverse a stage with the aim of saving Hamm and other toys from being ground down to dust. The nostalgia-meter was running on high as the experience often felt more like a Pixar movie than a video game.
Extending the lifespan of the game greatly is the Toybox, which is essentially a large sandbox where you get to complete a wider range of missions not based on any movie, but involving many of the famous faces from the toy box. You can spend hours here, building items in your sandbox, completing missions, defending the bank from thieves, dressing locals in the stuff you’ve collected, and other minigames. The list of things to do really is staggering, and after hours and hours of play I still had only about 20% of my lots built upon, meaning there is potential for much more.
As I sat back and marvelled in the presentation, I was amazed that a game had the voice talent from the movie too, only to be rocked back to earth after I researched and found it wasn’t them at all. The voice of Woody is, however, done by Tom Hanks’ brother Jim, and Jim sounds remarkably like Tom, so I didn’t feel quite as cheated as I had moments before when I saw Tom hadn’t been involved. For stand-ins, I think most people who play this will never know the cast weren’t the real actors.
Beyond that, there really isn’t much more to tell you. It’s polished, sharp, enjoyable, and there is plenty of fun to be had over months and months. If you enjoy games for games sake – and if you have kids – then this is pretty much a must own.
8.1
