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DS | Strategy | Toy Shop

Boxart for Toy Shop
Toy Shop 17 screen shots
  • GRAPHICS: 2.50
  • SOUND: 2.00
  • CONTROL: 3.00
  • FUN FACTOR 1.00
  • AVG USER SCORE n/a
  • AVG CRITIC SCORE 1.0

Review: Toy Shop

Review by Emily Balistrieri | 04/01/2008 | 09:04:23 AM PST

Welcome to Santa's workshop in hell. Toy Shop's Harvest Moon-esque scenario tasks players with rejuvinating the family shop and raising $50,000 dollars in three years by making and selling toys to customers with seasonally affective fickletude. Let me tell you what is wrong with this game.

The Workshop

The male half of the duo builds the toys. Dragging a blueprint to the righthand column sets him to work, and while each toy takes a certain amount of time and money to make, you can optionally speed up the process by hitting the d-pad to choose the correct tool. Hitting the wrong button is an auto-fail, though, so it's often better to abstain. Either way, you're still liable to fail (even if you master the quick-time event) due to the horrible leveling system.

How can you make a profit when it takes you well over a hundred tries to reliably manufacture a toy? Level one is usually seven straight failures. This means that when you finally unlock a new toy (after another toy hits level ten, which took me three "months--" almost a third of the game), you'll have to sink massive funding before you can even get it on the shelf.

The Front Room

The girl is chained to the register because I'm a slave driver. She waits for customers to show up and sometimes they don't buy anything. That's fair-- sometimes they do. All in a day's work. But wait, I thought we were playing a game in our spare time for enjoyment?

You can tap patrons to see what they'd like to buy and how much money they have, but it's better to just refill your inventory as needed rather than speculating.

The Town

If you feel like being lazy and closing your store for the day, there's a town you can visit, but only people with speech bubble icons say anything besides a brief comment on the weather. One summer I helped a fellow with his love affair by delivering notes to a beach babe. After a week of this, he taught me how to build a boat, but unfortunately and unsurprisingly, it was beyond my budget.

In the commercial district the fruit lady says there is something suspicious about the clothing store owner, and when I went down there he was perfectly normal... although he seemed conventionally effeminate. Tell me this didn't just happen! This game was already offensive enough without resorting to cartoonish stereotypes.

The Suck

The characters models are ugly despite aspiring towards cuteness, and the soundtrack will turn your brain into oatmeal. At least there was no multiplayer to inflict on my friends. The best thing I can say about Toy Shop is that it's not broken, but given how imbalanced the failure rate feels, it might as well be.

Pros: It might not be broken.
Cons: Literally everything else.


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