My favourite pastime in Toy Story 3 is drop-kicking a Pizza Planet alien into a tailors and dressing him up in an Elvis suit. Or a lumberjack outfit. Or maybe a skirt and a beard. The kind of cheerfully goofy act that makes all the sense in the world during playtime. Not just for video games, but for real toys too. Like the time I adorned Luke Skywalker with a fetching bonnet from the Sylvanian Families’ wardrobe before doing battle with Mumm-ra in a tutu. Whereas games and TV can fuel a child’s imagination, toys allow it to go off-road, free from the restraints of structure or logic.
Toy Story 3: a weepie to remember Toy Story 3 – fittingly for a game of the film about toys – understands this essence of play better than most children’s games. Its ‘Toybox’ mode is a free-roaming expanse of dust land based on Woody’s Roundup, the fictional cowboy town seen in the films. As Woody, Buzz Lightyear or cowgirl Jessie, you take on the job of sheriff, helping out Mayor Hamm and the townsfolk while expanding the settlement; building schools, barbers and banks. There is a semblance of structure, of course, with hundreds of missions and distractions to take part in, but they’re all built to compliment the game’s focus of creativity, exploration and good old-fashioned mucking about.
It’s all simplistic stuff, as well it should be, though hampered slightly by fussy controls and an intermittently dodgy camera. But it’s a breezy pleasure for the most part; parachuting Army Men onto a painted target, chasing down bank robbers and literally throwing (or drop-kicking) them into jail, protecting a vegetable patch from pesky moles by throwing brightly-coloured plastic balls at them. Each successful mission is greeted by a hearty jingle and an explosion of fireworks and ticker-tape, the kind of celebratory visual flourish that makes everything seem important and exciting, even if it’s just for sorting out a citizen with a new T-shirt.
There’s an overwhelming amount of tasks scattered around the area, and much of the fun in Toy Story 3 is had just seeking them out; exploring the toytown Wild West on the back of Bullseye (Woody’s trusty steed), hurtling around in a sports car or just clambering up cliff sides to find a train track you can skate on. Much like in Lego Harry Potter, the genius of Toy Story 3's exploration is that there’s always something shiny in the distance to catch your eye; a toy capsule that unlocks an item in Al’s Toy Barn, a gold mine that can be whacked with a pickaxe for coins or just a citizen in need.
It’s easy to lose hours just pottering around Woody’s Roundup, racking up coins and capsules. But the game’s greatest pleasure comes in creative customisation and expansion. Every building in Woody’s Roundup can be painted and adorned with trinkets. Just wander up to your chosen building and a menu will appear, allowing you to decorate in any way you see fit. Want the walls of your bank to be made of golden stones? Sure thing. Want the decking of your jail to be a bright turquoise? Go right ahead. Want to fit Finding Nemo fins to the side of the town hall? Well why not? It’s your town after all.
Exactly. It’s your town. And watching it grow from a ramshackle collection of grimy, brown buildings to a vibrant, bustling city is a genuine delight. Expanding the town is as simple as ordering a new citizen, building or hairstyle from an Al’s Toy Barn vending machine. When they arrive, more missions are unlocked. So when you build a school, you have a whole sports day to take part in. The game cheerfully rewards you for your enterprise and creativity. The toybox mode is perhaps best summed up by the ‘Pictomatic’ tasks, where the game provides you with a photograph and you have to go and recreate it. So, for instance, you have to dress up three citizens with ponchos, guitars and Mexican hats to create a Mariachi band. Or there’s one where you have to find a cactus shaped like goalposts and drop kick a citizen through for a field goal. It’s silly, fun, imagination-firing stuff that celebrates the simple art of play.
There are niggles, however, mostly technical. The controls are overly complex, with a lot of actions crammed on the pad. And moving around isn’t as tight as you would like. Barrelling around the world in free play is fine, but during a harshly time-limited race the stodgy movement arcs can be frustrating. While the character models are beautifully rendered, embellished with animation faithful to the film, environments can lack texture. Throw in a handful of visual and audio glitches and you have some rough edges that perhaps betray the curse of the movie tie-in: a short development cycle.
Either that or Avalanche wasted the time they could have spent polishing on a perfunctory story mode that follows the events of the film. This is more the kind of by-the-numbers stuff you would expect from a game of this type. It’s not awful by any means – in fact there are some excellent ideas at play on occasion – but it’s scrappy and half-baked. It’s almost as if the development team built Woody’s Roundup and were then told to throw in some arcade levels based on the movie. It starts off well enough, with Woody and Bullseye racing against a train hijacked by the evil Doctor Porkchop. There’s some neat co-op puzzling in the next level with Woody, Buzz and Jessie having to work together to negotiate their owner’s bedroom. But then it falls apart somewhat with a recreation of the Buzz Lightyear video game scene in Toy Story 2. It just feels rushed, with repetitive tasks and fiddly controls. By the time you’re performing some naff mini-games in a nursery, you’ll just want to get back to Woody’s Roundup.
And quite right too. The mode is the perfect use of the Toy Story license, peppering the free-roaming area with recognisable characters and allowing you to interact with them in the way they should: as toys. Toys that can talk and set you fun tasks, of course, but toys nonetheless. All set in a world where common sense isn’t important, and the evil Emperor Zurg can set up a space station next to a Western saloon painted like a rainbow fish. A world with a sense of humour and fun that will appeal to children and adults alike. A bit like a Pixar film, then. How about that?
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