Parents' Guide to Toca Life World: Build Stories

This seamless collection of locations, objects, and characters for open-ended imaginative play is limited mostly by how much money you want to spend. Toca Life fans will love the opportunity to collect all their worlds in one place. It's easy now to pop into the stable, go on vacation, visit the hairdresser, and stop by the office. There's opportunity here to create a huge, interconnected world -- that is, if you want to pay for it. The free download includes quite a bit of content. And those who've already bought apps in the Toca Life series have even more of a head start. But even so, growing this world requires a bit of an investment, which could make Toca Life World: Build Stories feel like a push to buy, buy, buy. It's important to note that the developer included a way to turn off the shopping icon, which gives parents a great option for avoiding this pitfall. And though it looks great to keep adding to the world, there's actually a good deal of repetition across locations. Sure, there's different scenery and some different objects, but the essence of what's available in the school isn't all that different than what's available in the city, for example. The Toca Life Mix animated stories give kids some inspiration for creating storylines and help support Toca Life World: Build Stories' storytelling potential. The build-your-own sections give kids lots of autonomy to create and take the lead in their play, but also present another area where kids can pay real money to buy more options. Toca Life World: Build Stories shines as a largely flexible platform for imaginative play. It's up to families to decide if this digital space provides as rich an opportunity for pretend play, imagination, and role play as off-screen forms of this most traditional type of play do -- or if they both have a place in their kids' lives.