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Earlier this week Disney Interactive revealed Disney Infinity, a new gaming platform with enormous potential for future developments. Launching in June with three of the studio’s major franchises in tow, (The Incredibles, Pirates of The Caribbean and the upcoming Monsters University) the future already sees a number of additions lined up for the new platform.
A first glance at the Infinity platform one cannot help but be reminded of Skylanders. Characters are played with by placing their figurine onto the base and unlocking their world inside the game. The initial line of these figures contains a wallet-numbing forty characters. Mr Incredible, Sulley and Captain Jack Sparrow come with the Infinity starter packs. Characters' items and experience are saved to the figures. Stat upgrades and special attacks are saved to circular tokens placed under the figures as they sit on the base, with up to two tokens allowable at any one time. The characters will also work across platforms allowing the player to take their figurine from a PS3 at home over to an Xbox-owning friend and play with it there.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96U2gkgK0o4[/youtube]
Within the game, the characters play inside a “Play Set” of their own universe where they experience virtual stories and quests appropriate to their world. There is also a separate Toy Box world-building mode which will allow characters from different universes to interact and players to create their own unique world pulling on designs from all the unlocked universes they have, supposedly in a similar manner to level building on Little Big Planet. These will be available for sharing across the console’s network.
No doubt more will be revealed about Infinity over the coming months but the system has certainly piqued the interest of this GeekMom. I’m looking forward to playing but as with Skylanders, my concern about the figures being little more than a cunning money-making scheme will have to be allayed by brilliant game-play. Only time will tell whether or not Disney can provide it.
The Disney Infinity starter pack and a number of extra figures are currently available for pre-order on Amazon UK costing £64.99 and £12.99 respectively. At the time of writing nothing has yet appeared on Amazon US.
