Approximate Release Month: April 1993
Genre: Action
Developer: Absolute Entertainment
Publisher: Absolute Entertainment
The cavalcade of sub par licensed games continues with Toys.
It’s tough to describe Toys because the game fails to gel in any meaningful way. You play as Robin Williams’ character from the movie and you have to wander around a toy factory and shut down security cameras. These cameras are guarded by a host of evil toys that have to be destroyed before the cameras are vulnerable. These enemies move erratically, so good luck avoiding taking damage. Five hits and you’re done.
Destroying enemies is way more difficult than it should be. Toys gives you some interesting weapons – well, toys – to use, but they aren’t reliable or predictable. The starting gun shoots weak peanuts in an arc, the bowling ball goes in a straight line and bounces around like crazy, the racecar and duck run around until they hit something, the stuffed elephant does a poor job at homing in at bad guys, and so on. It’s great how inventive and situational these power-ups are, but it’s frustrating to actually do anything with most of them. The ones that need precision suffer from Toys‘ mushy controls, and the more random ones will do the exact opposite of whatever you want them to do.
I wasn’t able to get past the first level of Toys, but a quick looksie at YouTube indicates that there are only four levels, the last of which is a Gradius III-style scrolling shooter. It seems that this is a super short game made difficult to stretch the experience out. But Toys is bad. Real bad. At least it’s not a platformer, right?
Next week: … Wayne’s World is a platformer. Ugh.
In 3-4 attempts I nearly beat the first level before dying to the last freaking tank. That was more than enough for me.