A console for young and old, the Wii has an inexhaustible supply of party games. A plethoric contingent periodically enriched by all the possible and unimaginable publishers, who always find in the back of a closet a good old license around which it is possible to cobble together a dozen stupid and hypothetically amusing mini-games. On this last point, we cannot deny the sympathy potential of this Toy Story Mania!. Clearly aimed at the youngest, Papaya Studio's production relies quite skilfully on the charismatic characters who made the success of the two films. Buzz, Woody, Rex, Bayonne or even the Martians, the crazy toys multiply the nice little interventions over the 35 mini-games on offer. However, this number must be put into perspective since certain sequences turn out to be almost identical and all of them point to a particularly uninteresting fairground universe. Throwing rings at targets, shooting balls or plates, most of the game is spent shooting the screen in order to destroy as many objects as possible and get as many points as possible. To complete the levels at 100%, it is sometimes necessary to show a bit of refinement by knocking out certain odds and ends in a specific order. After these vague subtleties, you won't need to rack your brains too much. The few entertainments offered to break up this monotonous destruction do not fly very high, and in particular invite you to reproduce the movements of one of the heroes of the game, to play pinball or other activities that are generally boring and not always very easy to run considering the age of the target. Playable using only the remote control, Toy Story Mania! would have thus gained from exploiting the capacities of the nunchuk a little rather than giving in unnecessarily to a few fads. Five mini-games are thus playable "in 3D", the 3D in question having little to do with that displayed during the last Video Game Festival by Ubisoft's Avatar. Here, armed with one of the two ridiculous pairs of special cardboard glasses offered with the game, you will have to try to peel your retina off to catch a glimpse of a semblance of a micro-thingy coming out of the screen. The technology and the means are obviously very different, but the interest of tearing your eyes out in two-tone to play darts seems very difficult to demonstrate. Presented as very user-friendly, the title also disappoints on this point since at 4, the mini-games are played either by two simultaneously, or one after the other, forcing at least half of the participants to confine themselves to a role of spectator. To make matters worse, these multiplayer games turn out to be particularly chaotic, the cursors tending to get lost in the middle of the extremely colorful environments. Not very thrilling in single player – the Story mode being designed as a succession of “worlds” that the developers did not take the time to connect to each other, forcing you to return to the starting screen once each environment is finished – Toy Story Mania! is therefore not more impactful with several people.
