Toy Story the game has its moments, but frustrating controls and level design may drive you away
To start, the graphics are quite impressive for their time. To compensate for the new at the time CGI animation, the game tries to look just like the movie and for the most part, does fairly well. For 16 bits, the levels and characters look nice and detailed. The music, however, falls a little flat. Most of the tracks in this game are just forgettable and other renditions of songs from the movie, like "You've Got a Friend in Me", sound pretty bad.
The levels are loosely based on scenes from the movie. Well, most of them are, but there's quite a few that have nothing to do with the movie like fighting Nightmare Buzz or helping Rex who helps you escape Andy's room. Other than that, we play through Andy's room, Pizza Planet, Sid's house, the streets and more. Don't expect a long game though, for the whole thing can be completed within a half an hour. Spite a few extras thrown in to fill up time, which I can forgive, the game follows the movie very well.
For most of the game, you take control of Woody. In those levels, you can only jump or use your pull string to latch onto hooks to navigate through platforms (or swing) or as your weapon to take out enemies. These levels play like a platformer and for the most part, it's ok, but it's nothing special. For one thing, the jumping feels a little awkward as not only can you not jump high, you feel heavier than you should too. Another frustrating part of the game is the platforming itself. The sections where you need your pull string to swing are annoying as your shot has to be dead on or you'll fall right through. Other gameplay types are thrown in to mix things up as well like the RC missions where you have to guide RC through a tight path, a running level where you automatically run while jumping and dodging obstacles that get in your way, or another level set up In a first person where you must deliver the aliens back to the claw machine. These levels are a nice change of pace and mixes up the action from the frustrating platforming, but they all come with their own frustrations like the loose controls of the RC levels, making it difficult to navigate through the maze without slamming into a wall. The running sections also suffer from difficult controls. Overall, spite some difficulty spikes and frustrating controls and platforms, the gameplay is just.....ok.
In the end, as far as movie licensed games are concerned, Toy Story for the Sega Genesis and SNES is just average. While the variety in gameplay is nice and the graphics make it feel just like the movie, you'll be turned off by the annoying controls and frustrating level design of the main game. Overall, it's an ok game and I enjoyed it as a kid, but it's nothing to write home about. I'd recommend watching the movie instead, that held up much better than the game.