Toy Story: Retro Roundup! + Toy Story 3 Complete Edition review: a wonderfully playful collection with a point to prove

Launched to celebrate Toy Story's 30th anniversary, the new Toy Story: Retro Roundup! + Toy Story 3 Complete Edition is the kind of mixed bag of the good and the curious that makes these retro game collections and remasters so engaging. This one has a slightly complex buying choice: you can buy each game digitally for $24.99 / £22.49, or get the physical double pack for $49.99 / £39.99. The double pack with Toy Story: Retro Roundup! is where you get the meat of what Digital Eclipse does so well – deep histories, interviews, concept and design docs – while Toy Story 3 Complete Edition is the standout game, for reasons I'll explain.

Which brings us to Toy Story 3, a game where, somewhere, in the 2010 movie tie-in, there’s a much better game than we have, and it’s been sitting there the whole time behind a campaign that you feel obliged to play, like being told you can’t have pudding until you’ve cleared a plate of greens. We’ve always known it, but playing Toy Story Complete Edition on Switch, remastered to 4K and 60fps, makes that idea starker and more obvious than ever.

Back when this first released, everyone was torn between the PS2-era habit of letting a silly idea grow into a whole game and the ability to render larger, detailed worlds – the kind of stuff that was about to swallow AAA gaming – and Toy Story 3 is a licensed platformer that mostly does things the old way while smuggling in one idea that’s years ahead of its time.

Story mode: the greens

In Story mode, you play Buzz, Woody, and Jessie across scenes lifted from, or inspired by, the third film (plus a wink at Toy Story 2 for the fans in the form of a video game inside a video game), swapping between them to solve platforming puzzles, which sometimes means using someone’s special ability and sometimes, more often than not, it means literally throwing Jessie at the problem. It’s all just… okay.

Every level has its own gimmick, so you get the obligatory tiny-toy-in-a-huge-bedroom bit with boxes and beds to hop across, then some rail grinding, then kart racing, then an After Burner-style shooter section with Buzz zipping towards the screen, then a Sam Fisher-ish stealth stage where you’re sneaking round a prison dodging spotlights and springing toys from their cells. Avalanche keeps it all moving at a fair clip, which is the problem: the second an idea starts to get interesting, you’re dragged off to the next scene; the platforming gets fiddly in ways that don’t feel intentional, and a couple of the bosses are more annoying than hard. Defeating Emperor Zurg while platforming and shooting is as much a battle with the camera and controls as it is with the Big Bad; 2010’s problems are now 2026’s problems.

It reads like a studio ticking the licensed-game boxes: a bit of racing, a bit of shooting, a bit of stealth, and it all pales in comparison to the side of Toy Story 3 that’s been sitting in the corner of the map screen, teasing and taunting me: Toy Box mode.

Toy Box: the pudding

Toy Box is the ‘extra’ mode on the edge of the in-game board game map, and the whole game feels Pixar-y from the moment you start playing. It turns Toy Story 3 into something else, something meaningful, cosy, and fun. You wander the small sandbox world freely, take on simple missions, unlock buildings, and bolt them onto the town, and the sleepy little settlement slowly fills with life until it feels less like a map with objectives and more like a playset to, well, play with. Toy Box gets under the skin of the license; it inhabits the spirit if not the descriptive nature of the film, and it does so without needing the tried-and-true play-the-movie formula.

While missions are small fry, like finding Slinky’s lost cows, running errands, winning races, parachute target challenges, rescues, and secret item searches, there are around 100 of these ‘missions’, and they build and dovetail to help grow the town itself. Dressing the townsfolk up as famous characters opens new missions, and the dressing-up is entertainment in itself because you literally throw these little weebles through shop doorways to change outfits.

All this feeds back into the town, unlocking more buildings, opening more things to do, and earning more coins; and because the map teases you with glimpsed secrets and items to collect, you end up following whatever you’re curious about. You can drive a toy car, chase down bandits, parachute with the Army Men, deliver the mail, grow giant vegetables, and hurl cows down wells, and there’s a loose story threaded through it all that I mostly ignored because the fun was in the mucking about.

You can see where it went next, too, because the DNA runs through later Disney and LEGO games, which is quite something for a game mode Disney was cool on ahead of development. A famous cast, and a familiar world handed to you as a playground for your own nonsense? For a 2010 movie tie-in, that’s a daft amount of foresight.

But there's more…

Much of what I’ve written here is as true now as it was at release, and I haven't mentioned many ‘remaster’ features because they’re slim on the ground. Toy Story 3 Complete Edition gets you up to 4K and up to 60fps on PS5, and 1080p at 60fps on Switch 2; it looks great in handheld mode, but that’s it. Still, it helps, with sharper environments and smoother platforming, and Toy Box looks especially good, with its glossy moulded-plastic townsfolk and little objects you can shove around.

What it doesn’t have is anything else. No new features, no extras, no behind-the-scenes material, just the original game on newer hardware, so if you’re after the lovingly curated history lesson Digital Eclipse does so well, that’s the companion Toy Story: Retro Roundup! collection, with its interviews, archive material and soundtracks, as well as its own cast of Pixar games that includes various console versions of: Toy Story, Toy Story 2: Buzz Lightyear to the Rescue!, Toy Story 2, Buzz Lightyear of Star Command, and Toy Story Racer – A Bug's Life is a bonus.

Bought as a double-pack, Toy Story: Retro Roundup! + Toy Story 3 Complete Edition offers a better balance of retro-gaming insights and gameplay. While Toy Story 3 is the best game here, because, well… Toy Box mode, the extras are well worth it for a small price bump. Plus, Digital Eclipse's collection of documentaries, interviews, oral histories, concept art folders, and design-doc files builds an engrossing story of what game development was like in the 1990s and early Noughties.

The Digital Eclipse special sauce

The older games are a mixed bag of excellent, good, and flawed curiosities, with Toy Story 2: Buzz Lightyear to the Rescue! being the standout 3D platformer (and here features enhanced PlayStation graphics that can be toggled between original-resolution and new upscaled graphics), while Toy Story Racer remains a fun me-too Mario Kart, and the original Toy Story is a Mega Drive / SNES platformer that set a visual standard by aping 3D rendering in 2D design, and for that alone, is worth persevering with.

A Bug's Life has all the camera flaws and quirks of a standard '90s 3D platformer tied to a film license, but it's also a rarer entry. All the games include Digital Eclipse's extras, like rewinding from deaths and even cheat passcodes, so you can overcome those unplayable flaws we used to accept.

This is a big 30th anniversary-primed collection of pure nostalgia. Toy Story: Retro Roundup! is worthwhile and makes this package more complete and interesting, because the headline act, Toy Story 3, remains as it's always been – a patchy playthrough of established platforming ideas in Story mode and a Toy Box addition that remains a real delight: a Wild West sandbox full of plastic cows and giant carrots that I’d happily lose an evening to when I'm not disappearing down Retro Roundup!'s rabbit hole of classic game documentaries.