Toy Bot: enemy of wooden planks everywhere.

Part WALL-E, part Spider-Man, Toy Bot swings, spins, and hurtles through a world of puzzles and perils in Toy Bot Diaries. Cute art, great music, and accelerometer-powered gameplay, put a fresh face on the game’s familiar elements, but Toy Bot Diaries is almost undone by one exasperating control issue.

Toy Bot Diaries looks like a 2D platformer, but it’s really a game of gradual exploration. You move by tilting your device to the right or left, sending the robot in either direction. Tapping metal walls or other magnetic objects fires Toy Bot’s electric grappling hook, which hoists the little guy into the air toward new areas. Once Toy Bot is airborne, the game’s physics engine really shines: swinging from handhold to handhold with the accelerometer feels great and is just plain fun. Toy Bot can also use magnetic boots to stay put in precarious places, a trick that’s required to grab items throughout the game. Those items are subject to the same physics as Toy Bot, and you’ll have to use your wits and electromagnetic gizmos to manipulate objects to proceed through each level and collect the scattered datapads that tell Toy Bot Diaries' backstory.

However, not every entry in our Toy Bot diary is a happy one. Using the magnetic boots reliably felt more like a matter of luck than skill, which made getting through many areas obnoxiously frustrating. We love a challenge, but we don’t like having to fight with a game to play it. The action gets sluggish when there’s a lot onscreen - which is fairly often - and this can throw off the timing required for trickier maneuvers.  Toy Bot Diaries uses frequent save checkpoints, but not being able to save anywhere combined with uncooperative magnetic boots may cramp the style of some mobile gamers.

But the battle with Toy Bot Diaries’ controls can be won, sort of, and while the game feels a little empty at first (more animations and objects would help), water effects and other imaginative uses of the physics engine liven up later levels. If nothing else, Toy Bot Diaries rewards patience: the best stuff is saved for last, and it really feels like the designers tried to outdo every wacky feature and puzzle they dreamed up. Toy Bot Diaries isn’t very long, but the price feels right for the polish and replay value.