Toca Life: City!

© 2015 Toca Boca
$2.99, iPad, iPhone, Android
Teaches: spatial relations, logic, creativity, language, fine motor skills
CTR Rating: 94%
Editor's Choice

CTR Review

2/17/2021 See also Toca Life World Build Stories 9/3/2015: New features include a new theater, four new characters with costumes and a screen recording feature, for up to two-minute puppet-show-like videos that include sound). Toca Boca plans to update app weekly with new video content. The added features are part of Toca Boca's effort to expand how children play with their apps. Here's the original review: If Richard Scarry (as in the famous Busy Town books) was illustrating children's books in the age of the touch screen, we imagine this would be the type of app he'd make. This is the second in the Toca Life series (the first was Toca Life: City) and it comes with 28 characters, four urban locations (a loft apartment, shopping mall, hair salon and food park), 51 possible hairstyles for the characters, seven food stands and hundreds of items that can be moved around. According to Toca Boca, this Toca Life series is designed to "encapsulate kids’ everyday lives, springboarding their imaginations and allowing them to be the directors of their own adventures and stories." Clever features include the ability to wrap items as gifts and take them to other scenes. You can also turn on/off the music or lights in every scene, and freely place items anywhere on the screen. There are no high scores, third-party ads or IAP (in-app purchases). There is also no language or labels, which is liberating and a missed opportunity. One can easily imagine a "touch and hear" feature incorporated into this app, that could make it an outstanding informal sight word learning experience. Need to know: to reset your town, push the round "reset" button in the upper corner of the main menu. This feature used to be hidden from the children, but now it is within their reach. Just be sure to let them experiment with it early on, because they can't reset the reset. The bottom line? This is another outstanding Toca Boca app.