Disney Infinity Toy Box App

iPad 2, 3, 4 and Mini, 250 MB download

Teaches: creativity, logic, spatial relations

CTR Rating: 94%

CTR Review

Powerful, easy to use but also containing plenty of tempting $1.99 in-app sale items, this open-ended construction kit expands the Disney Infinity cluster of toys and and video games, onto your iPad. It also represents a portal to toys and video games, so consider yourself warned. As with the Minecraft app, you can freely build and explore, however, we found this experience to be easier to use and to offer more creative options. Those who question the use of the multi-touch tablet for building and gaming should try this app. It's evidence that it can be done, in a very engaging way. You start with one character (Mr. Incredible) and one empty, floating square of green terrain. You soon discover that you can add more land, in blocks, and enhance it with cliffs, mountains and waterfalls. If you make a mistake, you can edit the parts fairly easily. Don't miss the castles, race tracks and trees. The biggest news is how your work can be played on other types of screens. You can also download other people's worlds, or upload yours for public use (not unlike "Little Big Planet.") Downloading one of the pre-made worlds wasn't exactly glitch free. Besides getting lost in a maze of menus and needing a Disney account, we found it hard to get started. If you don't have an existing account account, however, don't worry. You'll still have a successful building experience. In short, Disney Infinity: Toy Box may be free app, but it's a full standalone experience. The free edition includes one Mr. Incredible with a full set of building tools; the other 21 characters are shown as shadows -- to download them, you must pay $1.99. So do the math, that's $42 for all the characters. You can also download figures free if you have a web codes included with figures at retail. Our testers liked the intuitive multi-touch controls, which made it easy to build or edit a world or drive a car. There's plenty to do, with 60 free items to mix and match. The app gives players the ability to transfer Toy Boxes cross-platform for further editing and play. At the same time, any item unlocked in a player�s console version of the Toy Box will become available in the app. The app was created by Avalanche Software and Escalation Studios for Disney Interactive, released September 18, 2013. It runs on the iPad versions 2,3,4 and iPad Mini. It won't work on smaller screens.