Disney Infinity 2.0
Having talked about Disney Infinity before, I guess I should mention that Jorie got v2.0 as a belated birthday present.
I agree with most of the reviews out there: the game's improvements to its Toy Box mode make it even more addictive. They fixed most of the irritating things about building content in the Toy Box: your toy collection, rather than just being organized into idiosyncratic and lopsided categories, can now be viewed through a collection of "filters" that make it far easier to navigate, and the editor actually has an undo button and more "are you sure?" checks for dangerous actions. There are tools for procedurally generating random cities, treehouses and racetracks.
Best of all, the annoying random "spin" mechanism for getting new Toy Box toys is gone, replaced by a system where you can simply buy the toys you want with an in-game currency that you earn by playing, unlocked in a tree diagram similar to the new skill-tree system for characters. And if you have the Play Set pieces for version 1.0, while they aren't playable here, they do unlock all the toys associated with that Play Set in 2.0, so upgraders end up with a huge collection to start with.
But (as most reviewers also noted)... the Marvel superhero content that is the game's main selling point, and replaces the 1.0 version's Disney-themed Play Sets, is also its weakest point. Not the characters themselves-Thor, Black Widow and Iron Man, at least, are actually terrific additions and great fun to play with. The combat system has been beefed up in ways that make fighting a lot more fun, varied and challenging; there's a bit more to it now than "hit it until it's dead". But the Avengers campaign that comes in the box (the only one that's playable with the starter set alone) feels a bit too thin to be the centerpiece of this release.
Basically it's not that different from the Incredibles campaign in the first version: a quasi-open-world superhero adventure in a city of skyscrapers, with Frost Giants as the standard mooks in place of Syndrome's Omnidroids. But since two of the pack-in characters can fly, they've taken away the climbing-puzzle element that Incredibles revolved around (some characters, such as Spider-Man, can climb walls, but these three can't; Black Widow has to use elevators, peculiar streetcorner jumping pads, and pipe-climbing to get up high, unless Thor or Iron Man is willing to give her a boost). There also seem to be fewer oddball side quests, though there are still a number of challenge mini-games scattered around town. Mostly, you're playing the story missions, most of which are only of about three or four basic types: lots of smackdowns to get to some MacGuffin, object defense and escort missions.
I think part of it is that to try to make the Marvel Play Sets less twee, they took out the weird customization options that the Infinity 1.0 Play Sets had. A lot of players disliked those because they were completely irrelevant to the gameplay, but they actually provided a significant part of the exploration aspect (since there were red capsules all over that supplied customization options).
(Instead, the customizable wallpaper and ornamentation have moved to a new Toy Box environment called the "INterior", basically an arbitrarily expandable dollhouse for your characters. I wish you could make as many full-fledged INterior Toy Boxes as you like rather than just having the one as your virtual hangout, but Jorie seems to really like this feature, so what do I know?)
Avengers has its moments. Most of the voices are the actors from Disney's Marvel TV cartoons... but Nick Fury's voice actually is Samuel L. Jackson. My favorite battle so far was a surprisingly tough showdown with multiple duplicates of Loki, who like to shoot you repeatedly when you're already down. One of the more clever additions to the combat system is that being killed is slightly less trivial a thing than it used to be: in multi-player, your character gets taken out of commission until revived by your partner with the usual multi-player "healing" mechanic, and in single player, you generally have to switch to a different character or go back to a checkpoint. It does make the game feel slightly more grown-up.
But my favorite bit of the Marvel content is actually not the full-fledged Avengers Play Set; it's a smaller side game called Escape from the Kyln, ostensibly set in the outer-space prison from Guardians of the Galaxy. It's an old-timey fight-and-loot dungeon stomp displayed with a top-down isometric view, and I love it. There's also a tower-defense game called Assault on Asgard; I haven't played it much since I don't really dig tower-defense games.
Anyway, quibbles aside, I'm actually having a lot of fun playing this with Jorie and solo. The improved Toy Box is definitely the jewel here.
I agree with most of the reviews out there: the game's improvements to its Toy Box mode make it even more addictive. They fixed most of the irritating things about building content in the Toy Box: your toy collection, rather than just being organized into idiosyncratic and lopsided categories, can now be viewed through a collection of "filters" that make it far easier to navigate, and the editor actually has an undo button and more "are you sure?" checks for dangerous actions. There are tools for procedurally generating random cities, treehouses and racetracks.
Best of all, the annoying random "spin" mechanism for getting new Toy Box toys is gone, replaced by a system where you can simply buy the toys you want with an in-game currency that you earn by playing, unlocked in a tree diagram similar to the new skill-tree system for characters. And if you have the Play Set pieces for version 1.0, while they aren't playable here, they do unlock all the toys associated with that Play Set in 2.0, so upgraders end up with a huge collection to start with.
But (as most reviewers also noted)... the Marvel superhero content that is the game's main selling point, and replaces the 1.0 version's Disney-themed Play Sets, is also its weakest point. Not the characters themselves-Thor, Black Widow and Iron Man, at least, are actually terrific additions and great fun to play with. The combat system has been beefed up in ways that make fighting a lot more fun, varied and challenging; there's a bit more to it now than "hit it until it's dead". But the Avengers campaign that comes in the box (the only one that's playable with the starter set alone) feels a bit too thin to be the centerpiece of this release.
Basically it's not that different from the Incredibles campaign in the first version: a quasi-open-world superhero adventure in a city of skyscrapers, with Frost Giants as the standard mooks in place of Syndrome's Omnidroids. But since two of the pack-in characters can fly, they've taken away the climbing-puzzle element that Incredibles revolved around (some characters, such as Spider-Man, can climb walls, but these three can't; Black Widow has to use elevators, peculiar streetcorner jumping pads, and pipe-climbing to get up high, unless Thor or Iron Man is willing to give her a boost). There also seem to be fewer oddball side quests, though there are still a number of challenge mini-games scattered around town. Mostly, you're playing the story missions, most of which are only of about three or four basic types: lots of smackdowns to get to some MacGuffin, object defense and escort missions.
I think part of it is that to try to make the Marvel Play Sets less twee, they took out the weird customization options that the Infinity 1.0 Play Sets had. A lot of players disliked those because they were completely irrelevant to the gameplay, but they actually provided a significant part of the exploration aspect (since there were red capsules all over that supplied customization options).
(Instead, the customizable wallpaper and ornamentation have moved to a new Toy Box environment called the "INterior", basically an arbitrarily expandable dollhouse for your characters. I wish you could make as many full-fledged INterior Toy Boxes as you like rather than just having the one as your virtual hangout, but Jorie seems to really like this feature, so what do I know?)
Avengers has its moments. Most of the voices are the actors from Disney's Marvel TV cartoons... but Nick Fury's voice actually is Samuel L. Jackson. My favorite battle so far was a surprisingly tough showdown with multiple duplicates of Loki, who like to shoot you repeatedly when you're already down. One of the more clever additions to the combat system is that being killed is slightly less trivial a thing than it used to be: in multi-player, your character gets taken out of commission until revived by your partner with the usual multi-player "healing" mechanic, and in single player, you generally have to switch to a different character or go back to a checkpoint. It does make the game feel slightly more grown-up.
But my favorite bit of the Marvel content is actually not the full-fledged Avengers Play Set; it's a smaller side game called Escape from the Kyln, ostensibly set in the outer-space prison from Guardians of the Galaxy. It's an old-timey fight-and-loot dungeon stomp displayed with a top-down isometric view, and I love it. There's also a tower-defense game called Assault on Asgard; I haven't played it much since I don't really dig tower-defense games.
Anyway, quibbles aside, I'm actually having a lot of fun playing this with Jorie and solo. The improved Toy Box is definitely the jewel here.