By this point, you've probably heard a lot about Infinity, Disney's combination of Skylanders and Minecraft that lets you play and create with a mashup of the company's top movie and TV properties by purchasing figurines that interact with the game. We've seen preview after preview, tons of announcements of characters and worlds that will be included and heard lots of pontifications on what this means for Disney's struggling videogames group.
What nobody's been able to talk about until this week: So, what's it like to actually play this thing?
Disney Infinity launched on Sunday for Xbox 360, Wii, Wii U and PlayStation 3. The starter pack including three figures is $75, additional figures are $13 and random packages of Power Discs that upgrade your characters are $5. (Many retailers currently have deep discounts on Infinity stuff.) We played the Xbox 360 version, so your experience may vary depending on which version of the game you buy.
Unless you really want to dive into the Toy Box and start being creative, it's most likely you'll end up playing the structured game levels first. Infinity's starter pack includes three such "playsets": Pirates of the Caribbean, Monsters University and The Incredibles. Two more are currently available in stores: Cars and The Lone Ranger.
How to actually describe these playsets? The thing that first came to mind while playing The Incredibles was "Crackdown: Junior Edition." It felt a lot like Microsoft's super-powered open-world game, especially in the amount of time spent climbing up the sides of buildings, trying to find a pathway that will let you clamber from window to ledge to rooftop. But it also had that addictive quality: You were constantly getting missions and you could be working on four or five of them at once, running around collecting doodads, killing enemies, hauling tiny little Lego-person criminals to jail. Along the way you could activate more structured challenges – the game might set up a whole row of balloons across a series of rooftops and you'd have to collect all of them within a time limit to earn more experience points, money, and more items that go into the Toy Box mode.
We would play and play and play this thing until the wee hours of the morning. It had that one-more-mission quality to it that might make it difficult to tear your kids away unless you're in the habit of letting them, too, stay up until 3 a.m. It also, we soon found, had a lot of Crackdown's jankiness. Weird bugs and unpolished moments are going to be a constant highlight of your Infinity experience, from stuttering voice clips that sound like skipping records to massive framerate drops and near-freezes, especially if two co-op players are doing two separate, memory-intensive things that cause lots of stuff to appear on screen.
I'm not saying this hurts the experience. It can certainly make things a little frustrating when you're trying a particularly tough challenge again and again and losing because of some glitch or another. But you kind of have to embrace the jank. It can help as much as it hurts. At one point the game kept telling me that I needed to buy an as-yet-unavailable new power from the store to get on top of a certain building, but instead I used the Hover Board that we'd acquired, sailed off the side of an adjacent building, double-jumped in midair and was able to just catch the lip of the building I needed to be on.
Actually, that Hover Board helped a lot in a "Toy Box Adventure" – a mini-game challenge in the Toy Box mode – that we were having a really tough time on. You played as Jack Sparrow and you had to collect some balloons scattered around an island within a tight time limit. We tried again and again and couldn't do it. But after we'd gotten the Hover Board – items you unlock in all of the playsets become available in the Toy Box – I was able to get everything with relative ease. And not because I was actually using the Hover Board the way it was intended. If I pressed the button to deploy the Hover Board in midair, Jack Sparrow would go into an animation that made it look like he was riding the board, but the board itself wouldn't appear. But what this would do was reset the double-jump counter. So I'd be able to jump, double jump, hoverboard, jump, and double jump again to get ridiculous horizontal distance in the air, with Sparrow contorting himself wildly.
Was this intended behavior or a bug? Who knows! But it's fun to find exploits like this that let you "break" the game, regardless of whether or not you're meant to.
You need to use these advantages as the challenges can be quite difficult. In one particularly tough one, a co-op partner and I had to collect balloons (there's a lot of that, I know) in the world of Monsters University, climbing up buildings, hanging onto ledges, etc. We each had a different path to run and we had to spend a lot of time just figuring out the optimal path that let us collect all the balloons without backtracking, and it seemed basically impossible at first. Eventually we figured out how we could juuuuust snag our respective final balloons as the timer kicked over to zero. But it still wasn't done because we had to have a run where we both executed flawlessly. This is not an easy game, if you follow up on all the challenges!
Speaking of multiplayer: I've played these levels cooperatively on the couch so far (the screen splits to give each player their own view of the action), but it seems to me that this is the ideal way to play it; having a friend to team up and tackle challenges with is probably the most efficient way of getting things done. Some challenges only require one player to succeed for both of them to get rewarded. And you don't have to decide as a group what to do. One player wants to drive around with no aim in particular and another wants to complete missions and check them off the list? Go nuts. This is my kind of co-op game, the kind where I don't have to cooperate for beans if I don't want to.
Of course, you can't play the playsets cooperatively unless you buy more figures, since the starter pack only comes with one character from each franchise. (The most economical way to do this would be to buy one of the three-packs of figures, which include one more character from each of the three core franchises.)
The rest of the playsets turned out to be pretty similar to the Incredibles experience, with slight differences in the gameplay that are more appropriate to the franchise in question: Cars has no climbing up buildings and more car races. Monsters University has no battles (but a lot of paintball matches) but just as much climbing and jumping. But they're all open-world games filled with missions and scattered from hell to breakfast with collectible capsules that unlock more stuff in the Toy Box.
Of the Toy Box itself, I think Penny Arcade's Ben Kuchera has the right of it: It's hard to escape the feeling that Disney left out some important information when it sold us on the creativity mode. It's possible to create some pretty impressive stuff with Toy Box, including actual videogame levels that can time you and keep score and use logic and everything, but not right out of the box. Lots and lots of the "building blocks" – not just cosmetics but actual functional key parts – are locked behind paywalls and playwalls. We've sunk dozens of hours into the playsets and it feels like we've barely made a dent as far as unlocking new items. Many of them are locked behind a random "spinner," so you can't even spend your points on a specific thing you want.
These are all mechanics borrowed from free-to-play mobile games, of course, from the random spinners to the need to buy more figures to unlock more stuff. Then again, Infinity had a reported $100 million budget. So Disney needs to sell all of those figures and playsets and Power Discs or else the whole project will have been an expensive boondoggle.
So what's Disney Infinity like? Weird. And sprawling. And occasionally unpolished. But fun, at its core.
