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In many people’s opinion one of the best attractions in Walt Disney World is Toy Story Midway Mania, a ride that combines 3D glasses with moving vehicles and fun carnival midway style shooting games to create a fully immersive experience, and one of the most popular attractions ever built. Now Toy Story Mania is available as a game for your PS3 or Xbox so you can play at home.
Firstly let’s make one thing clear, this is not a new game. Toy Story Mania was released for the Wii way back in 2009 and this new release simply puts the game onto new formats (PS3 and Xbox 360). I bought the original game when it was released four years ago and I could instantly see some differences between that and the new release, even though I sold my old copy a few months after buying it. The graphics are cleaner and sharper although naturally some of that will come from the better graphics of my PS3 over the Wii, the menus have changed and there are more gameplay modes than before. However the basic gameplay has remained the same, point your Wiimote/Move controller/arms at the screen and shoot.
Toy Story Mania is made up of dozens of mini carnival midway style games themed around the different characters in the franchise, some are adapted from the theme park attractions and others are new. There’s a Western town for Woody, Buzz has you shooting at rockets and aliens in space, and Bo Peep wants your help rounding up her sheep. Some games wants you to throw hoops over things, others give you a dart gun to pop balloons and still others have you hurling custard pies at targets; however underneath that it’s the same mini game being repeated with different window dressings, and while I would happily ride the attraction over and over again, the game lacks that magic factor that keeps me coming back.
Of course, at my age I am far from the target audience of this game. My three year old found it funny to make things bang and pop and launch up into the sky but even his attention wavered very fast as it was just the same actions being repeated with little to show for it barring a high score which he couldn’t understand. I firmly believe that the same issue would come up with older kids too. The game is very well made for the most part* but it is just the same mini game over and over again. No matter how much a kid likes to repeat the same thing (and as someone who’s seen The Gruffalo at least thirty times since Christmas I can attest to the fact that kids love repetition) there is only so long they will stand in a room pressing one button to throw virtual objects at virtual dioramas.
Midway games are a fun diversion at fairs where they last a minute or two at most, and the same goes for the Toy Story Midway Mania attraction in the Disney parks which lasts just five minutes after whipping you up into a competitive frenzy in the queue. Trying to create a video game from a concept designed as a fast, impulse experience and thus expanding the play time by at least fifteen or twenty percent was just never going to work, there’s simply not enough going on to hold anyone’s attention that long. The game may fare better as a party activity but the age bracket who will enjoy it the most are unlikely to want to be standing around still for very long during a party.
Toy Story Mania is a well made, good looking game but the concept should have simply been built in as an extra feature on another game as it cannot hold its own for long enough to justify being a standalone game. If you have kids then they’ll certainly get some fun out of it, there’s little doubt of that; but whether that fun is worth dropping $30 on a one shot game is up to you.
A copy of Toy Story Mania was provided free for this review.
* Several times whilst I was testing the game the calibration failed on my Move controller and I would find myself stuck in a mini game unable to do anything for several minutes. I would have to either reboot the console entirely or wait for the mini game to finish (scoring 0) when the controller would spring back to life. It was impossible to tell whether this was a game or an equipment fault however my controller has not experienced any similar drops on other games.
