Well, this one’s a bit refreshing. Toy Story 3 is no normal movie licence title. In fact, it’s really only a hair’s breadth, at times, from playing with the big boys.

Nice Woody.

It’s really two games in one, with the standout feature being a lavishly detailed open-world ‘Woody’s Roundup’ scenario, in which you can run around a fairly large area as one of three characters, carrying out missions for various movie characters. Completion of these jobs starts to unlock a flotilla of cool stuff, letting you place new buildings, repaint them, and even decorate them with flower pots and mail boxes. Renovating the town well enough will encourage other small wooden ‘townsfolk’ to come and live there, and you can even mess about with them, giving them comedy moustaches or wigs to your heart’s content.

We’d almost be happy enough with just the cowboy town, but Toy Story doesn’t stop there, offering as it does a whole bunch of standalone scenario missions, generally featuring Woody, Buzz or Jessie in fantasy environments linked to their characters. This is where Avalanche – not the Just Cause developer, by the way – really shows off its tech, elegantly mixing platform and shooter genre conventions to produce inventive and genuinely original results. It’s an excellent example of how a considered approach to the confines of a movie’s plot can pay dividends to a licensed game’s playability.

For example, one level sees Woody kidnapped by a little girl named Bonnie who decides that a doll’s tea party isn’t exciting enough for the cowboy. As she imagines that one of her dolls becomes a witch, Woody spends the next ten minutes shrunk to a tenth of his size, outrunning a rising tide of coffee, getting lost in a hamster tank and finally being blasted into outer space where he has to reactivate a rocket with AA batteries to escape. It’s an astonishing feat that all these elements can even be fitted together so smartly, let alone remain as highly playable as they are.

The 'Rocket Level' at the top of Bonnie's House is a revelation

Toy Story is highly recommended for what we presume is its intended young audience, but we wouldn’t discourage anybody else from checking it out, either.