Toy Shop – NDS – Review

Toys are a wonderful thing. As children they
enrich our imagination, taking us to places both real and fantasy, allowing
kids to be superheroes, firemen, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, or anything
else they can dream up.

Toy Shop, a new simulation game for Nintendo
DS, attempts to show the inner workings of what goes on before childhood
superheroes are born. As the owner for a toy store, you build every plaything
from scratch, throw it onto the shelf, and hope parents are willing to pay
whatever price you slap on the box. It’s an industry tradition that has
occurred every year since the first toys were invented. And now you’re at the
helm.

Toy Story

Before your store is opened and ready for
business, you’ll step into your workshop and get to work on the first batch of
items. Only a handful are available at the start – a doll, a train, and other
primitive playthings. You’ll gain access to modern-day action figures, toy
spiders, sharks, and other goodies after making an insane amount of the toys
that are currently available.

I don’t know if it was the kid in me, the gamer
in me (who loves strategy and simulation games), or some unexplainable oddity,
but there was something that made me want to see which toys were available. I
spent hours trying to find out, a fact that will surprise gamers (of any age)
when they learn what this means.

As store clerk, you do nothing. You can click
the Open/Closed sign, align shelves with various toy offerings, and choose how
to furnish your store (shelves, boxes, display cases, etc.). But all of that
takes no more than a few seconds to complete. It isn’t something that has to
be managed constantly. Basically, if you have enough toys in stock, you can
click the Open sign at 9am, leave for five minutes, and return at closing time
(7pm game time) to see how much cash was raked in. It’s a do-it-yourself
experience, and the game does most everything on its own.

This doesn’t make a whole lot of sense at
first, but there’s a reason why the store runs itself. While the female
character enjoys the sound of every cha-ching, the male character is off
making toys. By switching over to him, you’ll now be in charge of D-pad
manufacturing: painting, hammering, clamping, and some other tool whose icon I
couldn’t quite decipher. These four actions are assigned to each of the four
D-pad buttons: up, down, left and right.

Down with the D-pad

If you’re in the market for a full train set,
which has a five-second manufacturing rating, you could put down your DS and
walk away. The game produces everything you tell it to (by dropping toy icons
into the toy manufacturing slot) automatically. Which must make you wonder:
why would anyone ever intervene?

Because if you don’t, the full five seconds
will be taken with every train. Before you know it, a lot of time has gone by,
a lot of money has been spent (toys aren’t made for nothing – you’ll have to
spend some of your starting cash and profits to make them), and not very many
toys have been made.

Players will be especially aware of their funds
in the early part of the game, which is presented yearly and separated into
four 30-day seasons. Trains and dolls do well in the spring. Not much else
will sell. You can spend the whole time working on those items, but then
you’ll be in trouble when summer hits. In the summer, kids wants stuff they
can use outside, like a blowup water tube. But you’ll have to manufacture
other, less significant toys before the tube becomes available. And you’ll
have to do that while dealing with customers who want trains and dolls – which
must also be manufactured.

By hitting specific parts of the D-pad as
various icons are thrown onto the screen, players can reduce the amount of
time it takes to manufacture each toy. As you can imagine, this is less fun
than watching wet cement dry. There aren’t any rhythmic elements applied, nor
does the game do anything to make the excessive D-pad antics anything more
than the most mundane experience you’ll ever have.

As Easy as a Plaything

Desperately seeking a smidgen of challenge, Toy
Shop prohibits toy growth with a percentage-based system that calculates the
likelihood that a toy can be manufactured successfully. Every toy begins at
9%. And every failed attempt costs just as much as a toy that’s finished and
thrown onto a shelf. In other words, you’re going to waste a lot of time – and
a lot of money – trying to manufacture toys that will not be completed. The
only way to increase your percentage is to continue making toys that don’t
want to be made. It’s a punch-yourself-in-the-face experience. You’re battling
against yourself. There is no enemy, no competitor, and not a single
overarching goal to achieve.

What do you get for all your hard work?
Nothing. If you’re careless and run of money, your characters’ parents will
offer financial aid. It’s the video game equivalent of when a nation’s
government steps in to stop a corporation from going bankrupt. However
necessary this may be in the real world (a debatable issue for another time
and place), it teaches gamers that they don’t have to be their best. They can
be lazy and be saved in the end, because there’s no such thing as “game over”
in this world.

And let’s be real: do the screenshots, childish
box art, or anything I’ve had to say in this review sound like something any
gamer will be dying to get their hands on? Kids will be bored to tears. Adults
will wish it were an object in Grand Theft Auto they could destroy. Teens will
laugh it off and go back to playing Halo. That leaves…grandma and grandpa, who
are too busy playing Wii Sports Tennis to eye a game that will surely put them
to sleep.

In fact, that’s just what it did. While waiting
for the game to manufacture 40 action figures (I eventually tired of pressing
the D-pad and vowed to avoid this play style), I decided to grab a pillow and
lay down. Next thing I knew, a few hours had passed. But since you can’t
program the game to work multiple days consecutively, just one game day had
passed, and only a handful of action figures had been manufactured.

Review Scoring Details for Toy Shop