Delightful Digital Dollhouse
Toca Life: Stable is the latest digital playset in the "Toca Life" series of apps that also includes:
Toca Life: Farm,
Toca Life: School,
Toca Life: City and
Toca Life: Town. Like other apps in the series,
Toca Life: Stable provides kids with a cute dollhouse-like world to explore, with movable characters, interactive objects and scenery, and four locations: stable, arena, forest, and shop.
Horses and So Much More
Kids create their own stories in Toca Life: Stable by moving characters and objects around and tapping things to see what happens. Kids can wash and feed horses in the stable, dress them in different saddles and bridles and go for a ride, jump over obstacles in the arena, and even dress up as Medieval knights for a jousting tournament. And that's just scratching the surface.
While Toca Life: Stable is obviously targeted at horse enthusiasts, the app challenges kids' creativity and imagination far beyond that one niche. In the forest scene, kids can roast marshmallows on a fire or take a canoe out on the lake. Once kids have rearranged the jumping obstacles in the arena to create their own course, one of the characters can strap on a helmet and ride a motorcycle through the course instead of a horse!
There are 24 characters, representing a diverse range of ages, genders, and skin tones, 16 animals (horses, of course, as well as rabbits, frogs and other creatures), and countless objects, including a wheelchair so that kids can play as a disabled character.
Players can swap characters in and out of a scene by selecting them from a ribbon along the bottom of the screen. There's also a truck that can move horses and other things between scenes.
App Analysis
Toca Life: Stable is cheerful, quirky, and creative app that offers players endless possibilities for role-playing.
Toca Life: Stable makes the world of horses accessible and rewards curiosity in fun and delightful ways. Not only do kids care for the horses by feeding, cleaning, and brushing them, but they will find unexpected whimsy, like when a player opens a port-a-potty door to find a pigeon sitting there! The app's attention to detail is fantastic, too, such as when a character is tucked into a sleeping bag, she'll fall asleep with Zs floating up from her head.
Thanks to multi-touch support, children can play together on the same screen – or one child can move more than one thing at the same time. Kids can also record short videos through the app, where they move the characters and record sound effects and dialogue through the device's microphone, and share their movie afterwards.
Best For
Toca Life: Stable is a must-have for horse lovers, but there's so much more to the app than just caring and riding horses. Any child will find something fun to do – even if they ignore the horses altogether. They can go camping, ride a dirt bike, have lunch at a café… the possibilities are endless.
This Toca Life: Stable app review was written by Erin Bell.
All tech products are judged on a five star scale by looking at the following factors: fun, education, ease of use, value, and technical.
