The Magic Toychest review

April 14, 5:46 PMPC Game ExaminerBryan Edge-Salois

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The Magic Toychest is a fun, family-friendly, physics-based puzzle game, much in the same vein as PC gaming classics like The Incredible Machine, and more recent titles like Crazy Machines 2.

The Magic Toychest tasks you with constructing machines from a variety of toys -- dart guns, teddy bears, balls, bats, rockets, and others -- in order to guide a ball and other toys into your toychest.

Toys that fall into your toychest become available for use in your machine. You'll frequently need to figure out how to get one set of toys into the toybox, and then use them in your machineto achieve your objective.

The Magic Toychest is charming and manages to capture virtually all the elements that make a successful, satisfying game. It's easy to play, it never punishes you for failure, and it becomes more challenging and addicting the more you play.

The Magic Toychest features 20 tutorial levels  to help you learn how to play the game, and more than 100 levels total. It's suitable for children old enough to use a mouse and read, although later levels get pretty challenging so mom or dad may still need to help out quite a bit. Playing The Magic Toychest can be a fun way to play games with your kids, and maybe even help them learn some problem-solving and computer skills to boot.

Don't let the family-friendly nature of the game fool you, however. The Magic Toychest can actually become quite challenging, and only the best, cleverest players who can complete levels in the fewest moves and the least amount of time will be able to unlock some levels. And once you've exhausted all the game's levels, you can download levels made by other players, or even create your own.

My only real -- and relatively minor -- complaint about the game is that I think the user interface could be significantly streamlined and improved -- for adults and kids alike. I would really like to have seen an interface that reuired little or no reading for the 4-5 year old set -- something World of Goo achieves quite well. Minor quibbles with the user interface aside, however, I think The Magic Toychest is a great game for all ages, and fans of Rube Goldberg should be especially pleased.

Visit the Magic Toychest home page for more info

More reviews of family friendly games:

World of Goo Review

Wallace and Gromit: Fright of the Bumblebees