Disney Infinity 2.0
Sep. 27th, 2014 03:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvinHaving 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.
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no subject
Date: 2014-09-28 12:03 pm (UTC)- On the XBox 360, load times are very long, and the game can pause long enough when you put a new figure on the base to make you think it's broken. I haven't yet tried installing the game on the hard drive, which may help.
- While you only get the one Play Set in the starter kit (there are two others, Spider-Man and Guardians of the Galaxy), at least you can play it two-player right out of the box, since you have three characters who can play there (and the game design definitely rewards cooperative play, with a number of what amount to raid missions; v1.0 really only dared to have one that was tough enough to cry out for two-player, "Science to the Rescue" in Incredibles). This is a huge improvement, arguably worth the smaller number of Play Sets, since this game is above all a game for parents and their kids to play together.
- While your v1.0 characters can only play in the Toy Box, that's saying a lot, since so much of the game is the Toy Box. I've heard they can even play in the open-ended "Exploration Survival Mode" of Escape from the Kyln. The v1.0 characters all have skill trees in the new world, giving them new abilities in some cases exceeding what they could do before.
- If your figures are heavily leveled up, that will carry over to v2.0, and you'll even be awarded a huge number of skill points to spend right out of the starting gate... but this will only work if the last account that owned them was the same one you're currently using, so you may need to take ownership in v1.0 first before carrying them over.
- Black Widow is the hardest of the three pack-in characters to start with, mostly because she can't fly and has to ride a motorcycle to get around town. Jorie wanted to be Black Widow prior to release, but in practice she usually picks Iron Man or Thor. So I usually play as Black Widow to level her up, and to add a bit of challenge (though she does hold her own in melee combat, especially once you unlock her excellent block-breaking electrical attack, which can be used more frequently than Thor's area lightning strike). She has a way of getting to the top of any skyscraper she really needs to.
- The current (Marvel) Captain Marvel, Carol Danvers, appears as a mission-giving NPC, and Fury even mentions her awesome power set, which includes flight, in an aside. Why isn't she a player character? I'm genuinely baffled. While I certainly understand why they'd make Black Widow the female playable character in the starter set, thanks to her prominence in the movies, I'd bet my kid would like to have Captain Marvel in the fray rather than just giving Iron Man errands to run.
no subject
Date: 2014-09-28 01:51 pm (UTC)That's her prerogative; I like the idea of a game that can be a place for completely non-directed play. Note, though, the game seems to have eliminated any means of leveling up your characters non-directedly. (You used to be able to do it with car stunts, which opened up some peculiar exploits.)
no subject
Date: 2014-10-18 03:33 pm (UTC)- Yes, you absolutely must install the game on your hard drive if you are playing the XBox 360 version. It brings the times for level loading and initializing a new character on the Infinity pad down from ridiculous to perfectly acceptable.
- Black Widow's lack of flying ability doesn't remain a serious handicap for long, because she gets access to a "Sky Cycle" pretty quickly; and when she's leveled way up, she's every bit as lethal as Thor and Iron Man. But she's more challenging to play in the early game.
- The Avengers campaign really is quite short, and definitely leaves you wanting more. Unfortunately, it doesn't really get less repetitive as it goes on. It ends with a boss battle that many kids will probably find frustratingly impossible, since it's so much tougher than most of the rest of the game, though it's not that bad by shooter-game final-boss-battle standards.
- Still liking Escape from the Kyln. It's almost a roguelike, though it's simpler, of course (it's usually compared to Diablo).
- The new tools for procedural, randomized creation of Toy Box worlds are incredibly cool; they're divided into Builders, little AI characters who slowly construct an environment for you, and Creators, which let you do the same more or less instantly. But the Creators have inconsistent user interfaces, and are kind of buggy (it can be hard to tell whether you're supposed to designate an extended area for them to fill, and, if so, precisely how you do it; more detailed tutorials would be a help here). Certain fumble-finger accidents with the Creators can bring the system down to a crawl, to such an extent that rebooting the console might be your only recourse.
- I've managed to construct some entertainingly vicious battle challenges in the Toy Box. Most of the toys you need to do this well were actually present in 1.0... but you may never have encountered them, because of the stupid slot-machine nature of the spin mechanism. 2.0 makes them easy to get, and adds some new ones. I like the new Enemy Wave Generator, which has a lot of configuration options to throw any collection of enemies you want at the player, and trigger events when either individual enemies or the whole wave is defeated. It's even possible to have enemies rampaging through your INterior dollhouse (there's even a special room that spawns some).
- A few play mechanics from Infinity 1.0 were actually taken away in 2.0: there are no grow/shrink pads or grow/shrink guns, and no wall jumping. The "monster truck" modification that the grow pads used to do to vehicles has been separated out into a new Monster Truck Pad. Legacy toys that used to have wall-jump areas, like the gigantic Cinderella Castle, have been discreetly modified with climbing ropes.
It's too bad, since that stuff was all a lot of fun... but those are things that require special animations and behaviors for every single character, and I suspect they were removed to simplify development of the new 2.0 characters, which are complicated enough already because of all the new stuff. (Curiously, the weird "inflation" prank effect from the 1.0 Monsters University Play Set does still exist, even for the Marvel characters!)
- There is no longer any leveling-up credit for vehicle stunts (though you can do stunts, and they fill up your turbo meter as before). That breaks the most famous old exploit for leveling up a character to maximum... but it took about ten seconds for people to come up with new Toy Box-based exploits for leveling up your characters rapidly and getting Toy Store currency.
The basic idea is to make a "spark farm" that, in a Repeater-triggered loop, spawns enemies with the Enemy Generator and instantly destroys them with the Kill Switch, so that it spams the vicinity with sparks of all colors. Just stand there, and you'll absorb them and level up. (All these toys were present in 1.0 as well, but, again, it may have been harder to actually get them.) But I haven't been so eager to do that; the Toy Box is balanced better than 1.0 so that the incentive to cheat the system somehow is not as great.
no subject
Date: 2014-10-18 07:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-10-19 05:40 am (UTC)