Toy Box Physics

Ahhhh, it’s time to take a step down memory lane.  Remember spending countless hours playing with blocks, toy airplanes, cars, and action figures as a child.  Well now you can relive those memories with Toy Box Physics, a 3D virtual play space game app for iPhone and iPod Touch.  In this game you roam around a 3D play room to demolish and create unique masterpieces made out of toys.  Just like in real life you can roam anywhere in the room, can look around at all angles, and can pick up, drop, stack, create, and destroy anything you want!

Created by Rich Olson, Toy Box Physics starts you out with a plethora of different toys to play with.  The game is somewhat more complicated than one would think by the name.  There are controls to move forward and back, separate controls for moving up down and all around, and additional controls to move from side to side.  On top of that there are buttons for grabbing, tossing, dropping, flipping and rotating, and deleting toys.  Although it seems like it’d be a game for kids, I think it’s probably too complicated for anyone under the age of 8 or 9.

The most impressive part of this game is how realistic the in-game physics are.  If you drop blocks they hit the ground, bounce and tumble.  You can navigate the entire room without restriction; 360 degrees.  If you bump into a stack of toys it wobbles and topples over.  You can stack up and knock over dominoes, watching them topple one after another in whatever design you create.  You’re literally free to do whatever you want in this game.  If you get bored with any of your toys you can toss ‘em, delete them, or even blow them up.  You can also add to your collection by making in app purchases.

List of Included Toy Box Physics Features:

• 23 included blocks and toys
• Realistic physics – stack, drop, toss, knock over, and blow up your creations
• Spell out messages with included letter blocks
• Email your creations to friends and family
• Create virtual dominos courses

Optional Upgrade Pack Features:

• Load and save up to 5 different scenes
• Reload feature that lets your knock over and destroy then repeat
• Autosave so you can exit the app and pick up where you left off
• 11 additional toys (Spaceship, Helicopter, SUV, Dice, Truck, etc.)

Overall I feel like Toy Box Physics is a decent app, but it definitely could use some improvement.  I love the 3D virtual game-play that it provides, but I feel like the game controls are much to conveluded.  Currently you’re completely dependent on the game-pad style controls and buttons to navigate the game.  It doesn’t really leverage the multi-touch and accelerometer technologies that make gaming on the iPhone and iPod Touch so great.  I’d like to see more accelerometer based navigation for moving forward and side to side, as well as more touch, pinch, drag, and drop functionality.  I feel like these types of updates to the game controls would raise the app’s fun factor quite a bit.  All in all, Toy Box Physics graphics are decent, the in game physics are fairly impressive, and the game-play is certainly challenging.

Posted by Ryan Johnson
on Jan 28, 2010
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