The Toy Rescue Story 3

This stage showing players how to jump, hang from ledges, use weapons

The game begins with you playing as Woody in a recreation of the movie’s awesome opening scene aboard a runaway train full of orphans. This stage serves as a tutorial, showing players how to jump, hang from ledges, use weapons you know, all the stuff you have seen before.

It helps that the graphics are surprisingly polished, but, other than the excitement of playing a scene from the movie, the opening stage of the game feels uninspired and, sadly, a little boring.

Back then I hardly had any good cooperative games to play with my siblings, and playing games with my parents usually amounted to me taking it easy on them so they wouldn't quit.

The story mode is still fun and worthwhile, but Toy Box is really the selling point for the game. It's essentially an open world quest-driven game where you play as the Sheriff of a toy town, using Woody, Buzz, or Jessie. And since it doesn't follow the movie's plot, the entire world is based around the idea of how the toys perceive their environment when they're being played with. The result is a mode that still has all the familiar faces that you'd expect from the film franchise, but that introduces a host of gameplay elements that fall well outside what a simple follow-the-film game would allow.

The quests in Toy Box are a little simple for most adults (though still fun), but what they're really good at is introducing the various ways you can interact with the world. Each new mechanic, instead of being told through a standard tutorial, is introduced in a quirky quest, making learning a whole lot more fun than usual. And even when the quests were far too easy I still found myself becoming addicted, as TS3's quest lines are structured in such a way that you'll finish one only to open up several more, making it easy to get into that "just one more" mentality.

But while Toy Box can be a really guided experience if that's how you want to play it, what I appreciate is how it really tries to put something in there for everyone. Kids, or people who just don't care about doing quests, can spend time decorating and customizing their town or citizens – right down to where they want buildings to be. Additionally, players also get the ability to do a host of other fun things like go on races, do trick courses with toy cars, or even just enlarge and shrink things in the world with piles of goo. The Toy Box always has something for players to do on a whim, encouraging kids and adults alike to just, well, play. After all, when we were kids our playtime wasn't always structured, right? Toy Box really gives you a chance to just let your imagination take you to silly places.

It's worth mentioning, though, that the PC version of TS3 has far fewer options in the Toy Box mode than the other versions. You can still customize the look of the buildings and of your citizens, but now when you customize one you customize them all. The result is that there's a lot less to do in town, and fewer ways to just play around. Furthermore, the PC version also has very little customization as far as the graphics go, making it a pretty mediocre looking game even if you have an awesome system.