Disney Infinity 2.0 Review

When you think about it, the title 'Disney Infinity' is a hell of a boast. And while it might be virtually impossible to make a truly infinite game, Disney Infinity 2.0: Marvel Super Heroes certainly comes close. Whether you'll actually want to play the game for an infinite amount of time (or at least until you die), well, that's another question altogether. Whatever the case, there's certainly a lot of game crammed into Infinity 2.0's Starter Pack.

Anyone who played the first Disney Infinity will already know that the crux of the game is to be found in the Toy Box, although there's a lot to see and explore in the Avengers Play Set included with the Disney Infinity 2.0 Starter Pack. In the main story mode, accessed using the bundled Avengers Tower playing piece, you can soar through a compact open-world New York, accepting missions from Nick Fury (voiced by Samuel L. Jackson) and a variety of Marvel characters, like Wasp, Captain Marvel, Sif and a host of others.

I. AM. IRON MAN!

It's good, solid fun for a while, until the objectives become rather tedious, as you punch your way through the umpteenth Frost Giant. With Iron Man, Thor and Black Widow included in the box, you'll find yourself plumping for the first two more often than not, as you can speed across the New York skyline using their flight abilities. Widow, on the other hand, has to run everywhere until she obtains the SHIELD Sky-Cycle. Her nippy combat prowess and agility almost makes up for it though.

Should you have the will to persevere through the numerous missions and challenges in the Avengers Play Set, the two power discs supplied with the game provide a good few hours of additional gameplay, with the Guardians of the Galaxy themed Escape From the Klyn; a top-down isometric shooter, and tower defence game, Assault on Asgard. All of this is simply a primer for Disney Infinity 2.0's main event in the Toy Box, presenting you with a veritable smorgasbord of objects and tools with which to build pretty much anything you could care to think of.

What's more, creating something, anything, is remarkably simple and straightforward. You can have a functioning level environment, race circuit or whatever, up and running in minutes. The Spark tool enables you to erase and manipulate items with ease, while the game's spiffy brush tool enables you to procedurally generate pieces of your creation and then prune it to fit your exact specifications if you like. There are plenty of great little shortcuts that take the headache out of building your own stuff, or at least reduce the hassle.

”Begone Frosty evil doers!”

You may still find that getting pieces to connect properly will require a meticulous and patient hand, as we soon discovered when trying to create a spiralling race circuit, only to find that the last piece didn't quite fit. Fiddling around in Disney Infinity 2.0's Toy Box is not without its frustrations, but it's admittedly an incredibly powerful world builder with hundreds, if not thousands of different objects to mess around with. If you're proud of your creation, you can share it with the world and download the creations of others. You can even invite friends into your world for up to 4-player action online, while the Play Set story modes support 2-player co-op.

Playing the main Avengers adventure (or indeed the Spider-Man and Guardians of the Galaxy Play Set's adventures sold separately), you'll collect blue sparks, which in turn act as currency for buying additional items for the Toy Box. It's a smart feedback loop that ensures you play the story-driven prefab components of the game, in order to fill up the Toy Box with shiny new toys. Each character having their own skill tree also helps in keeping the interest levels up, as you decide what aspects of your chosen hero or heroes to spend skill points on. New moves, upgrades and abilities are obviously par for the course.

Ninja Theory's involvement in the combat isn't immediately apparent, however, as sometimes certain commands such as picking up enemies or objects can prove unresponsive. The core of the fighting system itself is decent enough, giving you long range attacks on the right trigger, as well as strikes and dodges on the face button. And with a decent little yarn penned by lauded Marvel scribe Brian Michael Bendis, chances are you'll stick around for the duration of the Avengers' Play Set's icy Frost Giant-packed narrative starring Loki and MODOK as the primary villains of the piece.

There is one pretty big problem though, especially if you're looking to unlock all of Disney Infinity 2.0's achievements. You'll run into problems without purchasing extra figures, as some of the in-game feats require characters like Captain America, Hulk, Hawkeye et al, who are not included in the Starter Pack. They'll cost you an extra £15/$15 apiece (although you can shop around for slightly lower prices).

And therein lies the rub. Disney Infinity 2.0 is clearly geared towards screaming children nagging their parents for add-ons that cost a small fortune. The most annoying thing is that the Marvel figurines are so damn stylised and endearing that you'll probably end up parting with your cash at some point to complete your collection. Will you really be happy with just Iron Man, Thor and Black Widow? Probably not. We want to add Hulk at the very least (although he's not available until October 24th).

Disney Infinity 2.0's achievements reveal how much extra fluff there is to waste time with, such as the Toy Box's INterior mode that chucks your character into a swanky lounge area and then tasks players with adding adjoining rooms and corridors. Build a big enough INterior, and diddy guests will start showing up with mini quests for you to complete. It's largely disposable stuff, although some might grow addicted to prettying up their INterior with wall hangings, furniture and other crap.

A flying kick worthy of Bruce Lee.

The game's paltry set of 29 achievements do manage to cover almost all of the bases, encouraging you to sink some time into Disney Infinity 2.0's numerous modes. That said, it's rather by-the-numbers stuff, failing to take advantage of the innumerable possibilities that the game presents to players. How about an achievement in which you have to build something clever or weird? Or what about something related to the superpowered abilities of the game's heroes? It seems that far more thought has gone into Disney Infinity 2.0's feats than its achievement list.

A worthy follow-up to its forebear, Disney Infinity 2.0: Marvel Super Heroes ticks all of the right boxes, adding improvements to both its story-driven aspects and Toy Box. However, repetitious combat, a disproportionate emphasis on collectibles and bland mission objectives let the side down. The physical Marvel figures themselves are fantastic and being able to use all of your old figures and base from the first game is nice, but the fact that extra characters are pretty much a mandatory requirement for completing everything in the game seems more than a little devious. That said, put Disney Infinity 2.0: Marvel Heroes in front of a kid, or any Marvel fan for that matter, and they're almost guaranteed to have a good time for at least a few hours.