Disney-Pixar Toy Story 3

Hand a licensed game a Western frontier town, a pot of coins and permission to let the player decorate it, and something odd happens: the tie-in becomes the least interesting half of its own disc. That is the shape of Toy Story 3 on PS2. The story levels march dutifully through film-adjacent set pieces, and then there is Toy Box, where Woody gets a sheriff's badge, a horse and a town full of residents asking for favours, and the game stops behaving like homework.

n-Space handled the PS2, Wii and PSP versions while Avalanche built the HD release, and the split shows. This is a smaller, blockier Toy Box, with a shorter draw distance and fewer toys cluttering the dirt streets, but the loop survives the downgrade intact. You take on small jobs, earn currency, buy buildings and costumes, and watch the town fill out around you. Nothing is demanding. The appeal is that the game trusts a child to decide what the place should look like, which was rare in a 2010 licensed title and still rare now.

The story mode is the conventional part. Linear stages, simple platforming with a floaty jump, light combat, occasional vehicle and chase sequences, three playable toys with mildly different handling. It is competent and completely unsurprising. Checkpoints are generous, the camera is the main antagonist, and an adult will push through it in an afternoon without ever feeling threatened.

What holds up is the tone. The voice work and the look sit close enough to the film that the fiction never cracks, and Toy Box understands something about the source material that the plot levels do not: Toy Story is about play as an act of invention, not about hitting marks. Riding across the mesa to deliver a hat to a one-eyed alien is closer to the spirit of the films than any boss fight.

As a PS2 release it arrived at the very end of the console's life, when publishers were still shipping cut-down versions to families who had not moved on. Judged against that run of obligatory last-gen ports, it is unusually generous. The story mode is the ticket price. The town is the reason to stay.