You may remember Toy Physics for the iPhone, which we reviewed and loved earlier in the year, and the announcement made shortly after its release that the developers, Athos, were working on an iPad version too.  Well, the wait is over and the result is Toy Physics HD (iTunes link).

The concept is exactly the same as the iPhone edition, so we won’t go into too much detail here, but the idea is to fill crates sliding across the bottom of the screen with a certain amount of toys which fall from the top of the screen, hindered by a variety of obstacles along the way.  The toys range from jacks to wooden blocks to dolls and the obstacles from pistons to precariously balanced boards.

You’ve got three ‘lives’, where you’re allowed to miss three falling toys before having to restart the level, and there are three difficulty settings for the game; normal, hard and expert.  There are two main differences between them: the frequency and amount of falling toys, plus a higher number of toys are required in the crate before advancing to the next level, of which there are 40 in total.

To guide the toys into the crates, you must draw a line with your finger across the screen, so the toy slides in the required direction and hopefully, into the crate.  However, each toy reacts exactly as its real-world counterpart, so balls bounce, light jacks go off in every direction and heavy blocks drop like, um, heavy blocks.

As with the iPhone version, the physics and movement of all the toys is spot-on, and it makes anticipating what will happen when you draw your line much easier, and when things get hectic, this intuitiveness stops the game from becoming frustrating.

Playing in normal mode is a good introduction to Toy Physics and shouldn’t be too difficult to complete, but hard mode is much more of a challenge, with most levels needing a few tries to pass.  Expert is a different story, as the amount of toys on screen is almost overwhelming and you’ll need to adapt your strategy straight away if you want to beat it.

The game certainly plays well on the iPad, and it’s every bit as enjoyable, addictive and beautifully designed as its iPhone cousin, and we can’t recommend it enough to puzzle game fans; but we can’t deny we were hoping for something more from this HD upgrade.  While we didn’t want the gameplay to be any different, there have been no changes to the music or graphics – at least no discernible ones – or any additional levels, modes or anything which makes this standout from Toy Physics on the iPhone.  The differences which are apparent are those to be expected, for example it runs more smoothly here than it does on my iPhone 3G.  It’s a shame that the multiplayer Challenge mode we heard about never made it either, at least not in this version anyway.

Summing up Toy Physics HD presents a quandary.  On the one hand, we love the game just as much on the iPad as we did on the iPhone, but on the other, it doesn’t offer anything other than a big screen Toy Physics experience over it.  This leaves us recommending Toy Physics wholeheartedly, but if you already own it, don’t be expecting anything over and above the obvious here.  If you don’t own it, then take your pick, as they’re both superb examples of truly absorbing iPhone/iPad puzzling!

Overall: 4/5

Price: $3.99/£2.39