All right. Do you think that
Toy Story Racer does anything really inventive or amazing for the overfull kart racing genre? If you said no, you'd be correct. 'But then', you must ask, 'is it worth my time?' To which I must say:
yes. While it really doesn't do anything you haven't seen before,
Toy Story Racer has more things to do in it than any kart racer I've ever seen, and it will be weeks before you unlock everything there is to do.
As is usual with games of this sort, there's no real backstory or explanation. The various toys from the Toy Story world are going to compete against each other, for no real discernible reason other than that the environments are there. At the beginning, you're given a choice of four of the eventual ten racers, and away you go.
The first thing you'll notice is the game structure. Every racer has a large number of challenges to complete, all hovering around 20 each. However, each challenge has a different requirement to unlock it, in the form of army men. For every challenge you complete, you gain an army man, and all of the higher challenges require increasing numbers of the little green dudes to open.
After over an hour of completing these challenges, you'll finally start to unlock new characters. You'll keep unlocking characters until right before you beat the entire game -- they're scattered about in most of the racers' challenge stacks. It's definitely an incentive to keep doing the challenges, as you'll want to have all the racers to play in multiplayer mode.
The actual challenges vary quite a bit, and I was still seeing new types of challenges five hours into the game. They range from the expected -- straight-out racing, and reverse racing as well -- to the slightly less common -- battle arenas, and championship cups to go along with those -- to the unique, such as the races that you have to destroy every opponent and come in under the time limit to win. Those are an absolute bear. The 'destroy the targets' ones can also be frustrating.
An important thing to remember, though, is that you usually have a relatively large choice of challenges to do. At any given time you may have four to ten ready for you to complete, so if you're stuck on one, you have the ability to go and do something else for a while.
The single-player game is huge, and I doubt very many people will complete it all the way -- it's almost overwhelming in scope. Indeed, it's one of those games that you can pick up and play for twenty minutes or three hours, as you get a sense of progression either way. This is perhaps the best use of a 'carrot' in kart racers that I've ever seen, competing only with Crash Team Racing in terms of sheer 'things to do'.
The multiplayer game is fun, but it's only two players at once on splitscreen. There are a lot of different challenges, and quite a few of the races are very entertaining, but there are better multiplayer kart racing games out there, such as the aformentioned CTR and Speed Punks. Don't get me wrong: playing against a friend in multiplayer Toy Story Racer is quite fun, and you may well spend a few hours doing it. But it just doesn't have the staying power of other games in the genre, and it doesn't have the four-player support that makes others so enjoyable.
