Disney Infinity is an attempt to take the massive collection of characters and properties at the company's disposal, and provide a shared playground where you can genuinely play with all of your characters from Disney's catalogue of movies, instead of simply walking them through a preset narrative. It's a world organized around a simple toy metaphor—you're playing with toys, in a toy world, where enemies break apart like toys—with real-world figurines unlocking different characters in the game, and a large shared world where you can play with characters from all your favorite Disney, Pixar, and Marvel films.
Included in the Starter Pack is a copy of the Disney Infinity 2.0 game and the Disney Infinity Base (Version 2.0), a specialized NFC reader that is used with three different kinds of toys (Figures, Play Sets, and Power Discs). Each toy comes with an embedded chip that the base can read when the pieces are put on it. Functionally, it's quite similar to the Portal of Power from Skylanders Swap Force Starter Pack (for PS3)$37.68 at Amazon, which also lets you use toys to unlock characters in-game.
The game and Infinity Base are system-
specific, but the other pieces—the Figures, the Play Set pieces, and the Power Discs—can be used across any of the different gaming platforms supported. This includes all current gaming consoles, including PlayStation 4$399.99 at Dell, PlayStation 3$387.95 at Amazon, Xbox One$369.95 at Amazon, Xbox 360$293.00 at Amazon, and Nintendo Wii U$44.99 at Best Buy. You can also play on Windows, provided you set up a free Disney Infinity account and download the free PC version of the game. Sorry, iPad and Android users, there's no support for mobile platforms.
Also in the box are three figurines (Iron
Man, Thor, and Black Widow), a clear plastic Avengers Tower that is the Avengers Play Set piece, and a card with a redeemable code that lets you download the PC version of the game and share all of your characters and collectibles between the console and PC versions.
Infinity's virtual box of toys lets you play with those toys in two different ways. First, characters get their own sections of the game, called Play Sets. These are dedicated games that put characters within their own universe. In this case, it's the Avengers fighting off Frost Giants in the Avengers Tower. Any of the Avengers will work within this Play Set, but other Infinity characters (as varied as Merida from Brave and Stitch from Lilo and Stitch) cannot.
Second is a larger shared area called Toy Box. Any of the characters can be used here, whether it's current 2.0 characters like Groot and Donald Duck, or older 1.0 characters, like Mike Wazowski from Monster's Inc. or the characters from The Incredibles. In Toy Box you can mash up characters and elements, and also build your own play areas, be it cities, palaces, race tracks, and more. It can be a little labor-intensive, but accessible even for kids (think Minecraft for its building-block approach), and the creation of your own Toy Box sets lets you really personalize the game and adds the imaginative aspects of play back into gaming.
Playing Games
The basic elements of Disney Infinity are the same in 2.0 as in the original game, with characters able to walk, run, and jump, and given basic controls for interacting with the game world and engaging with enemies. The cartoony combat is very kid-friendly, with defeated foes bursting apart like broken toys. Characters all get their own unique set of moves and attacks; Iron Man can fly and fire his blasters, Thor can also fly, and hurl his hammer, while Black Widow is earthbound and packs a blaster pistol. Even though Black Widow's gun is a blaster instead of the bullet-firing sidearms used in the movies, it's a little weird to have a character in the Disney-fied game packing heat.
Infinity 2.0 does add a few improvements to the previous version of the game, with new skill trees for characters that let you unlock new abilities. For the Marvel characters, these are combat moves, costume changes, and new maneuvers.
The Toy Box now includes a bit of Marvel-influenced design, with a Spider-Man themed simulacrum of Manhattan you can explore, though it's extremely empty. Other areas already in the Toy Box include Agrabah from Aladdin, and a race track that lets you race against the characters from Toy Story and Cars. A separate section of the Toy Box, called the Hall of Heroes, is more like a collector's show room that catalogues all of the power-ups you've gathered in the game, along with boosts from Power Discs and a gallery of characters added with figurines (but you'll still need to use figurines to switch characters).
The gameplay is still fun, made all the more so with other online players, and the chance to modify and build your own virtual worlds is immensely entertaining. Disney isn't the only company pursuing the intersection of games and toys—see the latest Skylanders Trap Team Starter Pack (for PS4)$48.99 at Amazon for similar competition—but it has two things going for it that other games do not. First, Disney has a deep bench of recognizable characters that kids will immediately know and want to play with, from Donald Duck to Jack Sparrow to Iron Man. Second, Disney's approach offers both standard narrative game play with Play Sets and free play with user-created elements, injecting imagination into gaming, something sorely lacking from many other games aimed at kids.
Conclusion
With Infinity 2.0, Disney manages to improve upon the already-impressive world of Disney Infinity. With new characters, new play options, and the ability to bring over all of your figures and achievements from the previous game, the new game is more of the same, but in the best way possible. Instead of a single, collectibles-driven story line, Infinity gives you both stories to work through and open opportunities for real play, and that's a combination that works extremely well. Disney Infinity: Marvel Super Heroes (2.0 Edition) Starter Pack isn't the only game out there with collectible toys, but it's the best in terms of free-ranging play, earning it our Editors' Choice.
No comments:
Post a Comment