Few children’s app developers have as good a reputation as Toca Boca. Its run of creative, playful and carefully-crafted apps stretches back to the spring of 2011, and it’s not let parents down yet with a duff release.

At the moment, though, Toca Boca isn’t seeing that winning streak as an excuse to play it safe. In fact, it’s taking some risks making apps that skew a little older and a little more complex than previous successes like Toca Band and Toca Kitchen.

June’s Toca Builders took its cues from games like Minecraft, getting children to build blocky structures with the help of six cute robots. It wasn’t hard to use, but it challenged children to do more of the work – in a good way – to create the on-screen world.

Now meet Toca Cars, which continues that trend. It’s an app of two halves: one that gets kids driving a car around a town knocking things over, and one that gets them to actually create that town from scratch by placing its buildings and objects. And then knock them over.

In both cases, your child chooses one of two characters – “super cool” Viola Wheeler or her “wild little brother” Walter Wheeler – then chooses whether to start off in a pre-populated world, or an empty world ready for you to create.

The former sets you down in the middle of the town, and leaves you to get on with it. This being Toca Boca, getting on with it isn’t difficult. Children drive the car by placing their finger on the screen where they want it to go, then moving it as the car moves.

The handling feels great: skiddy, but not uncontrollable even for our four year-old. Every object in the world of Toca Cars is made out of (virtual) cardboard: houses, lamp-posts, traffic lights, trees, ramps and even a dog that once it spots you, follows you around yapping.

It makes for a neat and memorable look, with some very nice touches – like the paint puddles you can drive through to create colourful tyre-trails. The sound is also worth mentioning, with its satisfying clunks as things get knocked over and/or up in the air.

Once your child has caused havoc, you can tap a button at the top-right to restore the town to its pristine state ready for another go, or go back to the main menu to try the empty world mode.

Here, your child can drive around as normal, but tapping a big button with houses on it activates the editor mode, with a swipeable toolbar at the bottom of the screen full of the various objects that can be placed into the world by dragging them upwards.

It’s simple enough to do, although we think it’ll be slightly older children who’ll have the patience to put this kind of effort in.

That could suit siblings though: we reckon our six year-old will relish the challenge of creating a town for his little brother to destroy! And we have to be honest, the editor mode is enjoyable enough that we’d happily spend 15-20 minutes (or more) in the evening making a new town for our kids to explore the next day.

Toca Cars isn’t just about digital play though. “I hope that the cardboard world of Toca Boca will encourage some of you, children and parents, to start building your own car tracks on the floor at home,” writes play designer Chris Lindgren in the parents’ section of Toca Cars.

“Creating small houses out of left-over cardboard and hand-drawn doors and windows is fun and fairly easy. And we are pretty sure you’ve got a toy car or two in a drawer or toy box…”

Make that a toy car or two thousand in our four year-old’s case. But we love the fact that Toca Boca’s team were thinking about sparking this kind of physical play when making the app.

Anyway, Toca Cars is fab: a beautifully-crafted digital toy that encourages children to play, create and then take some of those ideas back to the real world. It’s a treat for mini-petrolheads everywhere.

Toca Cars costs £0.69 for iPhone and iPad on Apple’s App Store.