Cars Toon: Mater's Tall Tales for Wii Reviews by Gamers

This is my first Gamefly review, but I wanted to warn others looking for a great Wii game based on the Cars movies. This is not one.

My 4 year old son naturally loves Cars/Cars2: t-shirts, shoes, even mac & cheese and juice boxes, he literally eats, drinks, and sleeps Cars. We're making our way through the Cars Wii-game series. Cars 2 was very good. Not quite an A+ game, but a very good use of the Cars license. Cars Race-O-Rama was actually not too bad. Kind of a GTA-style game with lots of races and things to do. It could have been better, but was very playable. We have yet to play the original Cars or Mater-National.

Mater's Tall Tales was extremely weak. It's a collection of mini-games, 5 mini-games for each of 6 sections based on the Tall Tales series. You have mini-games based on Rescue Squad Mater, El Materdor, Tokyo Mater, Mater The Greater, Unidentified Flying Mater, and Monster Truck Mater. The player has to play through each of the 5 mini-games, in order, before unlocking the next, and all 5 have to be completed in a set before the next set is unlocked.

The 1st set based on Rescue Squad Mater wasn't too bad, a little bit of racing and a little bit of putting out fires. My son wanted to quit after only playing part of the first game, a horrible version of simple matching, in the El Materdor area (the 2nd set). I got him to stick in through that set and half way through the Tokyo Mater (the 3rd set) before hanging it up. None of the games were hard. Some were confusing trying to figure out the goal at times. Normally, my wife and I have to pry my son's hands off the Wii controller when a Cars game is playing, but no such hassle happened here. I had to finish some of the minigames myself because he was too bored to continue.

We didn't get to the ones that seemed like more fun (he really wanted to play Monster Truck Mater). It only took us an hour of playing to get through almost half the game. Rent before you buy. But in this case don't even rent.

All I can say is we rented this and Super Mario for Wii, and our 6 year old sent it back already. My child loves the cars games and couldnt wait to get this one but seemed to lose interest pretty quick. I am glad we rented it before we bought it. Worth a try to rent and let your child make up his or her own mind before you would purchase it.