Gamertell Review: Toy Story 3 app and Toy Story Mania game collection for iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad
by at August 5, 2010 8:03 am
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Disney played a little trick on gamers via iTunes. The company released two apps with Toy Story in the title and labelled them both as “Games.”
The first, Toy Story Mania, is a collection of cute mini games with progressive goals. The other, titled Toy Story 3, does include a hard-to-play Woody-themed freebie game but it is really a marketing tool to get you to see the movie, buy Toy Story Mania and partake in digital pin collecting.
Depending on which you download first and your expectations, you’ll either be royally pissed or sufficiently pleased.
Toy Story 3: The App
To be clear, even thought this is listed under “Games” in iTunes, this is not the main game you are looking for. That is in the next section, below. So if you want to read about that, skip this first section (and skip the Toy Story 3 app in iTunes).
If you downloaded the Toy Story 3 app expecting to play a bunch of mini games, you’ll be quite irritated. This app does include one game but it is really a gateway to a couple smaller apps and promotional materials.
The app primarily operates as a menu to a digital collection of pins you can earn by playing various Disney Interactive Studios games (including Toy Story Mania and Tron), movie trailers, information and a shopping cart to buy various Disney apps. It’s a pretty clever PR took as most people will download that expecting a cool game but, after you press the Toy Story Mania icon and see that it’s not a free game – or get to the “More Disney” link and see a shopping cart – you start to feel slighted.
There is a hard-to-play free motion-control game called Woody’s Wild Ride where Woody wides Bullseye through trails to collect icons. It may sounds cute but the drag on the system caused by the game’s heavy resources make timing the accelerometer movements pretty much impossible.
There is a cute little Woody’s Greetings mini app but that uses pre-generated names and selectable phrases to generate a “greeting.”
The most useful mini-app – which shoudl be in iTunes on its own – turns the iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad into a Toy Story 3 Controller for Mac (it controls the Mac version of Toy Story 3: The Video Game ).
The Real Toy Story Mania
Now, on to the actual game. Or, really, games.
Toy Story Mania is a collection of five mini games each with a carnival feel. There’s Hamm’s egg tossing booth, Buzz Lightyear’s ring toss, Bo Peep’s balloon busting darts, Sarge’s plate shooting game and Woody’s old West style shooting gallery. Each game uses the touchscreen for controls with a quick visual tutorial that will more than suffice. None of the games are overly difficult and can be linked to your Facebook page to promote the movie, er, games, er, publish your scores.
Each game also has a series of progressive goals you must complete to unlock a Free Play Mode and more difficult challenges (and earn coins to unlock other extras including digital pins and bonus attacks). Most prove to be pretty nice diversions.
The main menu has rather impressive animations and the games all come pretty close to having that Toy Story feel, though the Buzz and Woody games are most successful in respect to the latter. The ring and egg toss games have pretty similar ideas with one requiring you to pull back to launch eggs and the other to flick forward to toss rings. Likewise, Bo Peep’s target game is pretty close to Woody’s – tap the screen to simultaneously aim and fire – except to reload for hers you shake the device and for Woody’s you slide a bar to reload. The most enjoyable game may be the Woody target shooter and Buzz’s ring toss game is the silliest (assuming resources allow it to run smoothly).
Woody’s Roundup also has the benefit of looking a lot like the Move shooting gallery level in the Toy Story 3 PS3 game.
The most difficult to control is the Army Men shooting gallery. Although it sounds similar to the Woody or Bo Peep game, you use two hands to play. One moves the targeting reticule while the other simply taps to fire. It lets you get in multiple shots at once but it also means that your fat finger is always blocking part of the screen, making it pretty hard to hit anything entering the game field on the side of your aiming hand (and you have to lift your finger and reposition it to change the alignment of the reticule to your finger).
I sure hope they clean up those pesky resource issues and add another game to this as an update down the road.
Main or Mania?
Unless you own the Mac version of the Toy Story 3 video game, you can pretty much skip the Toy Story 3 app Yeah, it’s free so go ahead and give it a load if you are curious but do not expect to enjoy the game. The resources it requires of your system (except maybe the latest iPhone or iPad) will slow down Woody’s Wild Ride and make it a painfully uncontrollable mess.
As for Toy Story Mania, it’s cute and enjoyable enough to warrant a $5 (or less if it goes on sale) download. Unfortunately, all those cute animations in the menus mean you might need to restart your iPod Touch or early edition iPhone to make certain there are enough resources to keep it running.
Site [Toy Story 3 @ Gamertell] Purchase [Toy Story Mania @ iTunes] Download [Toy Story 3 App @ iTunes]
Photo Gallery [Toy Story mania Screen Caps @ Gamertell] Photo Gallery [Toy Story 3 App Screen Caps @ Gamertell]
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