Customer Reviews

Toy Shop

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

I bought this game at the store because I thought it looked fun. The front cover is well done and really draws you right in. I was also expecting something like MySims or maybe Animal Crossing, except a business setting.

The graphics are really bad! I mean, it looks like they didn't even finish it. The grass looks weird, and the camera view moves on it's own. It is even hard to move the people. Mostly you see the top of their heads. You can go talking to people but they say stupid things to you like, "Such nice weather." That is it. Nothing.

Did I say the GRAPHICS ARE TERRIBLE??? I mean, when you buy a game you expect it to have good graphics. This looks like THEY DIDN'T EVEN WORK ON IT. They probably know how terrible this game is, how bad the graphics are, how there is no point to it at all. A game gone wrong that they have to sell because they will lose out on money if they don't!

This game falls short of what you expect. Even when you make the toys, the stupid little character will fail and you will lose the money used to buy the materials. I played this game for 10 minutes and it went right onto Ebay. STUPID game. May be good for younger players, but I am a 22 year old gamer. I love games like Cake Mania, Mah Jong, Word Jong and The Sims, so I thought this would be a good addition. I was wrong.

While I wanted to like and support this game due to it being a niche product and something different from the norm, in the end it all comes down to how fun and well-crafted it is. And in the end, it isn't very much of either.

This game seemed to have a lot of potential, taking something from the Tycoon type games, where you have to create and sell a product, manage your funds, and so on, plus taking something from Harvest Moon type games where you add a more human element, talking to neighbors and trying to befriend people.

Where it falls down is how well these are implemented - in this case, poorly. While it's a bit interesting at the start to try to learn the ropes and manage your funds to keep from going bankrupt, and also a bit fun to find and unlock the various toy types, soon enough the game devolves into a boring grindfest of pressing the four directions on the D-Pad of the DS to try to make toys as quickly as possible, and pretty much nothing else. You can occasionally go out into the town to talk to people, but barring a very few, fairly obvious interactions where you get specific new toy blueprints, the people say the very same things day in, day out, and none of them are really interesting. The number of individual NPCs is very limited, and there's not really much to do in the end besides... make toys, in a very boring badly implemented mini-game.

So while I really wanted to enjoy this game a lot, and I think it had some potential and some grains of fun buried underneath, I wouldn't suggest it for everyone, or even most people. Maybe if they try to *really* polish it hard and release a sequel there can be something there worth playing, but for now, I'd give it a pass.

I agreed with what most everyone else said about the game at first. You couldn't get any where and it was boring. Then I figured out to focus on the 3 toys you have at 100%- build those and sell them till you make [...] or so and then start building another toy. It takes over 150 attempts before he gets to 100% of another toy. It is very possible to make money quickly though. I bought two different stores by the end of the first year and hit [...] by the end of the 2nd year. If you follow the advice and only go talk to people when you are prompted it will not take too much of your time away from building and selling toys. And it will have you talk with the right people to unlock other toys. This game is fun if you start it out right. Focus on the train, ragdoll, and spider and go from there.

I too thought this looked like a fun, interesting game. On the contrary, it was the most frustrating, boring game I've bought. I found it impossible to have money on hand to make toys, and when I finally did have money, the kid failed at building it and I lost the money. The kid's failure to build the toys was one of the most frustrating parts of the game- even when I was supposed to be at 75% accuracy, he still failed more than he succeeded at the building. It is impossible to make money because you can't set the prices high enough to make a decent profit, and it's boring watching customers come in and reject the limited selection (limited because you can't build anything!). Anyway, I think that about sums up my frustration. Save your money on this one, please. I'm just glad I bought it on sale.

I too thought this would be a fun game and was very disappointed in it. I even had my son try it out to see if I just wasn't understanding how to play it (since he's great at the game world), but he also couldn't understand it. It turned out to be a flop in our house, a waste of money! I wish I waited to read these other reviews before buying it... next new game I buy I'll come here first and read the reviews before I buy any new game.

This game is totally boring. From the casing you'd think it's gonna be a fun game about assembling toys and such but it's actually a boring game. I played it like once and never played it again.

I bought this for my eight year old daughter. She thought it would be fun to make toys. She said it was boring and not as much fun as she expected.

The premise of the game is that a pair of kids inherits a toy shop and they have to build it up and make big profits within a certain amount of time or they won't be able to keep it.

This sounds like it has potential for fun. Unfortunately, it really doesn't work out that way.

The game centers on the making and selling of toys, with an occasional excursion into other parts of town to talk to people. In practice, nearly all of your attention has to go toward the creation of the toys.

The character making the toys has a skill rating that represents his ability to create any given toy. This skill rating has several effects. It determines your odds of successfully making a toy, it determines how much time it takes to make the toy, and at high levels it can cause you to make toys 2 or 3 or more at a time instead of just one-by-one. Eventually, after you've gained a certain number of skill points in making a toy, it will unlock other toys (though in some cases you have to talk to people in town instead to learn a new toy).

The creation of toys is also a sort of mini-game. It's not much of one, but there's a small diagram on the screen which positions pictures of four different tools to correspond to positions on the direction pad of the DS. It's always the same tools in the same positions. While the character is making toys, he'll get thought bubbles thinking about the tools he needs. If you correctly push the direction corresponding to the tool he's thinking about, he'll advance very slightly in the process and save some time. If you push the wrong direction, he'll fail at making the toy completely. If you don't push anything, he'll just go along attempting to make toys but doing it more slowly than if he had help.

On the other hand, you have to sell toys. You really don't get to be very involved in this process, however. You can visit a real estate agent to ask to buy a bigger shop when you have enough money. You can buy the display cases and decide which toys go into which case and set the prices. You can also open and close the store. Everything else is an automated process of people from town coming in, wandering around on their own, and visiting the cash register.

The biggest problem is that the game is completely out of balance. What tends to happen is that you end up selling toys much faster than they can be created. Really, what this game ultimately tends to come down to if you want to do well is spending tremendous amounts of time staring at the thought bubbles of the tools while your little character is trying to make toys, to help him go as fast as possible.

So... most of your time you see a picture of a tool, and you try to push the corresponding position on the direction pad as quickly as possible. That's pretty much the game.

The really disappointing thing is that it had some potential. You get to make decisions about which toys to make and whether you want to focus on a few toys (in the interest of being able to make them as fast as possible) or keep working your way up to more complicated toys (larger profit margins and allows you to have a variety of things in the store to please more customers). If they hadn't made you actually sit and go through the process of making every individual toy, it could have been a little bit like a richer version of the old lemonade stand game.

As it is... I really don't recommend it unless what you really want is a game that requires virtually no real thought or planning the vast majority of the time that you're playing.

Even as an adult this game is fun. It makes you feel like a child again. You want to get 100% on each toy just to see what other toys you can make. If you like money, math and toys the you will definitely love this game.