Into the vault: Toy Story 2: Buzz Lightyear to the Rescue!

You know when I started doing this blog I honestly thought it’d be more retro-focused and I’d be doing entries like this multiple times a month, but silly me Disney decided to really ramp up their efforts and now while I still do plenty of retro content on here, I’d say it’s more of a 50/50 split. Anyways, with the Pixar movie Lightyear recently released in theaters and the release of the new version of PlayStation Plus that includes a selection of classic games, I thought it’d be time to look back at the one original Disney PlayStation One game included in that initial classics collection, Toy Story 2: Buzz Lightyear to the Rescue!

You may not be aware but there are a handful of older licensed Disney games you can buy on the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita (though Sony has made it difficult to outright buy them on those consoles) including Toy Story 2: Buzz Lightyear to the Rescue! so I suspect the rest will be made available sooner or later as well. The good news is you don’t actually need a PS Plus Premium subscription to access these games either you can outright buy them and if you bought them previously you can just download them right to your current PlayStation console.

Now getting to the actual game, Toy Story 2: Buzz Lightyear to the Rescue! is a 3D action platformer very loosely based on the movie Toy Story 2 and in Toy Story 2: Buzz Lightyear to the Rescue! You control Buzz as he does anything to avoid actually rescuing Woody from Al and being sold off to some collector in Japan never to be seen again.

And what I mean by that is it seems like your main goal in each level in Toy Story 2: Buzz Lightyear to the Rescue! Is to complete a few menial tasks like say find Mr. Potato Head’s nose or Bo Peep’s sheep and collect a few tokens and move on to the next stage. There are boss battles but that just nets you another token. And honestly, this would probably be at least fine if the game was at least and not like 90% of licensed games of the 90s and early 2000s in that it is extremely mediocre and might be considered downright unplayable by most modern audiences.

Firstly, in case it’s not obvious from the screenshots, Toy Story 2: Buzz Lightyear to the Rescue! looks like a mess. Granted it’s the same mess plenty of other games from that era looked like but it looks even worse being played on a modern TV. There are games from this era that look great but too many were desperately trying to figure out 3D polygons and failing hard and stuff like this is the result.

But even that might get a pass if again, Toy Story 2: Buzz Lightyear to the Rescue! was fun to play at all. Ready to constantly miss jumps and aim badly due to terrible depth of field and poor camera angles? Also, remember how Buzz can’t fly, but “fall with style” which is basically gliding? You’d think he’d be able to do that in a video game and it would make perfect sense and would work really well in this type of game but no, you get a double jump that honestly isn’t generous enough and that’s it.

The objectives aren’t fun either. You wanna race a car but you have to race on foot and Buzz is not particularly fast! I mentioned finding pieces of Potato Head and Bo Peep’s sheep but aside from somewhere in the level you aren’t given an indication of where these things are so you just have to look around for something that frankly only vaguely resembles what they described and for all you know could be in some corner you can’t even see.

Toy Story 2: Buzz Lightyear to the Rescue! is just emblematic of what many action-platformers, but especially licensed action-platformers of the 90s and early 2000s were with only a handful of exceptions. Ugly, poor camera controls, and just uninteresting. Do yourself a favor and play the far superior Toy Story 3 video game.

That’s all for today. A new mobile game, Disney Mirrorverse has recently been released and after not playing for a while I’ll be getting back into Marvel’s Avengers as the game is getting a new hero next week in the form of The Mighty Thor Jane Foster. I might not actually have time to both play and write about these before the end of the month but if that’s the case I’ll certainly write about both of them in the first full week of July so see ya real soon!