For those that may not know what Disney Infinity is, it’s an action platformer game that requires separate character pieces to play the game. The game of course comes with some characters, but to play as your favorite, you’re more than likely going to need to buy them separately. You then take said character and place it on a platform and the game reads the chip inside and pops the character seamlessly into the game. Now I’m not 100% sure if you can play the old game with the newer characters or if you can play through all the different levels with any of the old. I don’t know if you’d really want to do that either, but hey… it’s your life.
With Disney Infinity 2.0 they added the Marvel characters… okay the Marvel movie characters and a few random well-known characters. With this year’s Disney Infinity 3.0 they’re adding Star Wars and the latest Pixar film Inside Out. The main addition of course being Star Wars.
With Star Wars there’s obviously a lot of characters to tackle. Like a fucking lot. So which do you do first? Well they did the ones that everyone knows or wait… no they didn’t. See the game is geared towards kids and frankly the gameplay is repetitive and basic like all good platformers. It’s something you unwind with, not hardcore game with. At any rate Disney made the character selection based on the fact that kids don’t know shit about Star Wars.
Now, here’s something I don’t find myself saying often, Disney made a wise choice and decided to get the core Star Wars characters and basically reintroduce them to a new audience. Along with this they added the Star Wars: Rebels characters that kids do know so that they can understand that they’re all connected.
The Star Wars addition is being done in two phases. The first is a set that runs you through Episodes 1-3, called Twilight of the Republic. It brings some of the only tolerable characters from those films for the gameplay. Really you’ll probably just play as Darth Maul or Yoda and wonder why they didn’t make a Padme figure… like seriously why didn’t they make a Padme figure?
The other half of the Star Wars is basically episode 4-6, called Rise Against the Empire, and here all the classics are present (see gallery). I didn’t get to play this one, but again I think it was a wise move to basically remake the movies on a smaller scale for kids that have probably never watched the movies.
I played Twilight of the Republic and it was okay. Like I said it was repetitive, but then most platformers are. It’s definitely geared towards kids because it takes a lot to die. I finally did after running through a huge chunk of the level and making no attempts to block or dodge… or find life. The battles are simple and plenty, but not so annoying that you wish they’d go away. Frankly, it would be perfect for a younger kid if you needed them distracted for like an hour because even they wouldn’t want to play much more.
There will of course be a play set for The Force Awakens and I would suspect one for every movie afterwards. Thankfully they didn’t do one for each of the existing Star Wars movies, but I’m sure the thought crossed everyone’s mind. There’s also a new playset for the Hulkbuster Iron Man armor and Avengers 2, because frankly the figures are the best part and I swear people probably just collect them rather than open them and play the game.
I didn’t get to play the toy box mode which is a shame because it’s probably the mode I would have had the most fun with. You basically make levels and mini-games, but maybe the Star Wars segment wasn’t ready to show. The game isn’t actually done yet even though it was very close, at some points I had to switch to different characters to pass a level because there wasn’t a secondary way for my character to clear it if they didn’t have the Force. The game will be out this fall, I suspect just in time for the holidays and will be on every platform, even mobile. It was fun, but I don’t know if I would buy it or play it again. Maybe when my son is older and they’re on Infinity 7.0 or something.