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Making a good kids’ game is hard. By the time your skills are refined enough to deliver a solid experience you’re out of touch with your audience. It’s a strange crux to face, but the folks at Avalanche software stared it down and delivered a very solid experience for the minors. Toy Story 3: The Video Game straddles the line between story-driven and purely experiential gameplay to offer the best of both worlds for kids who want a lot from their games.

For most kids whatever the one game you get for your birthday or Christmas will have to last you a very long time. That’s why longevity is the key to delivering a solid title for youngsters. Avalanche Studios understands this concept and delivers an infinitely re-playable experience that is long, but not just for the sake of it.

Toy Story 3’s open-world Toy Box mode is as close to an offline MMO as you’ll find in a kids’ game. Players are given absolute freedom to explore a large western setting (straight out of Andy’s imagination) and are given plenty of things to do while in the Toy Story world. There are missions to collect and complete, buildings to customize and mini-games to be conquered but the pacing is left entirely to the player allowing them to enjoy the bits they like and ignore the bits they don’t. The result is a free flowing experience that gives players absolute control of their world in the best way possible.

This has all been done before of course, but where Toy Story 3 takes things one step farther is in providing real incentive for players to push themselves to succeed. Brief commercials for in-game unlockables play to remind players that there’s something cooler waiting for them, and players are always able to see a list of what they could be enjoying. The wait for reward is further accentuated by a small cart that physically drags the items in to town for the player rather than having the prize simply appear before them. It’s a clever process that breeds anticipation of the best kind and accentuates the joy of earning something new to play with.

Self-governance metagame aside, the Toy Box missions are simple enough to complete but fun enough to draw players back. They provide just the right amount of challenge for young people who want to do it all and there are enough collectibles to give developing minds a hoarding complex. Combine that with the fun and creativity that comes with the mass customization available in the game and you’ve got a winning experience.

If the Toy Story 3: The Video Game had shipped with just the Toy Box mode it would be a quality game, if disjointed from the actual story of the movie. For all the characters, music and art that matches the film, Toy Box mode doesn’t do much to capture the essence of the film as well as a straight-forward campaign would. Amazingly, Avalanche Studios found time to include an 8-mission story mode that loosely follows the events of the film.

Campaign mode doesn’t follow the story 1:1, it adds in a few extra fantasy levels and skims a lot of the story. This means that in the unlikely event players are playing the game before seeing the movie very little will be spoiled. The missions are a mix of traditional action-platforming with slight puzzle-solving and a few open-space instances to explore and conquer. It’s a short experience, lasting only 2.5 – 3 hours total but it packs in a surprising level of polish for a licensed game.

Many of the levels take direct inspiration from some of 2009’s most popular titles; the opening sequence is a lot like Uncharted 2’s train level without all the guns, and there’s a vertical platforming stage that was clearly influenced by ‘Splosion Man. Woody, Buzz, and Jessie play an homage to The Lost Vikings in a few stages with character-swapping gameplay, while the Buzz-only levels are a throwback to Rebel Assault. Avalanche even found a way to take the best parts of the recent Sonic games and work them in to a rail-riding level that tests players’ muscle memory. It’s all very subtle, but letting good game mechanics of yore influence the overall design results in a campaign that’s as fun as it is varied.

The only thing really holding the game back from being truly fantastic is it’s controls, particularly in the combat portions. The characters can all throw Pixar balls at enemies, but targeting and trajectory are so loose that it can cause some serious frustration. There’s also a lot of objectives within the open-space instance levels that use repeat mechanics from the Toy Box mode that just aren’t as fun when you’re not working towards a reward.

Toy Story 3: The Video Game is a surprising success. Any 10 year-old with a fascination with the flick will get an experience that not only brings all the characters to life, but provides a lot of fun in the process. The single player campaign is a little short and has it’s ups and downs, but the Toy Box experience is infinitely re-playable with much fun to be had. Older gamers might get some joy out of the game on a purely mechanical level, but only if they can forgive some mechanical weakness. However, Toy Story 3: The Video Game is a must-play for young people who love games and love Toy Story 3.

Toy Story 3: The Video Game was released on June 15 2010 for Xbox 360, Playstation 3, Playstation Portable, Nintendo Wii, and Nintendo DS.