Disney Infinity review

For a company synonymous with magic and childhood wonder, Disney Infinity should have been the blockbuster game of the summer. Its combination of collectible Skylanders-esque figures and a Minecraftian world builder have been proven breadwinners elsewhere in the industry, so you would think the added dose of everyone’s favourite Disney and Pixar characters would only serve to sweeten the deal.

It certainly starts off well, offering brief, tantalising glimpses of all the various Play Sets as it takes you through the opening tutorial. Every stone and street lamp seems alive with adventure as you roll from one environment to the next, and as the land unfurls from the leafy campus grounds of Monsters University into the roaring seas of Pirates of the Caribbean and the sprawling metropolis of The Incredibles, its promise of a boundless Disney universe never seems stronger. With just a little imagination, the game tells us, anything is possible.

The stylised toys are lovingly made and each portal on the Infinity Base can support an additional Power Disc underneath the main figures and Play Set orbs

In truth, imagination is something Disney Infinity is sorely lacking, for as soon as the tutorial’s over, you’re deposited in the Toy Box. Here you can build your own worlds using every piece of Disney-themed paraphernalia you can think of, but your opening selection of toys is limited to say the least. When the best items amount to a handful of flat green terrain pieces, some shrubs, race track pieces and Cinderella’s castle, the starry-eyed wonder of the tutorial already seems a little hollow, and you’d have to be very creative indeed to construct anything better than the pre-built world already available to you.

To really let your imagination fly, you’ll need to play through each of Disney Infinity’s individual Play Sets. These are short games based around Disney’s flagship franchises and the starter pack includes Monsters University, Pirates of the Caribbean and The Incredibles. Others such as The Lone Ranger and Cars are available separately, but will set you back around another £27 each time. Here, you’ll find red and green pop cap toys scattered throughout each Play Set, and collecting these will help grow what’s inside your Toy Box. Purchasing items with in-game currency also unlocks more stuff to play with, and levelling up your figures lets you have a go in the Disney Vault where you can spend coins for random prizes.

Sailing plays a big part in Pirates of the Caribbean, and you’ll soon swap your dingy for a full-sized galleon

It’s a cunning way of tying the two main game modes together, but in practice it’s a rather slow and laborious process that will likely try the patience of even the most ardent Disney fans. Some Play Sets, for instance, are more suited to being turned into games than others. Pirates of the Caribbean is by far the strongest of the three starter sets as its swashbuckling eye for adventure lends itself well to the game’s inherent focus on exploration. As you sail seamlessly from one island to the next (without a single loading screen to break up the action, we might add), the hunt for the next pop cap toy becomes so tightly intertwined with your main objective that you actively want to explore every last nook and cranny so you don’t leave anything behind once you raise the anchor.

Local citizens are also on hand to give you quests to help round out the time you spend in each place, but most amount to fairly inane tasks that only take mere seconds to complete, such as finding someone’s lost sister who happens to be standing within spitting distance of the quest-giver. We were even asked to throw someone into the sea on two separate occasions. Kids might get a kick out of it, but too often they fall into a repetitive tedium that does little to enrich your main quest.

Clambering up buildings in the Monsters University Play Set is a lot of fun, but it’s often for the sake of boring fetch-quests

This is a particular problem with the Monsters University Play Set. Inside of playing to its strengths as a stealth title, it relies almost solely on tiresome fetch quests to pad out its story. Your very first task, for instance, is to clean up the MU campus. It doesn’t exactly inspire much confidence in the rest of the game, and things don’t really improve even after another two hour’s worth of play. “Scaring” toilet paper off trees (we kid you not) is a poor substitute for scaring real monsters and even when you do have to infiltrate your rival campus, stealth and scaring plays such a small part of the action that you could almost mistake this for the very worst of movie cash-in titles.

This is a real shame, as the open world of the MU campus and Fear Tech are beautifully crafted and you actually get a much better sense of them as living, breathing places than you do from watching the film. Curious players will love strolling through the grounds and roof-hopping between buildings, but there’s only so much you can do before it’s back to the slog of the main story. Had a little more thought gone into the quests, they could have been great opportunities to help players explore the world to the full, offering rare toys as rewards or another prize from the Disney Vault. Instead, they’re used as a crutch to prop up its ailing and uninspired story lines.

You’ll be pummeling a lot of robots in Metro City

Even The Incredibles suffers from an over-reliance on these kinds of quests despite its clear focus on action and combat. The explosive opening and tightly structured half hour does a lot to help rectify the monotony of Monsters University, but it soon settles back into a tiresome yo-yo act between the Supers HQ and the various districts of Metroville as you battle Syndrome’s minions and top up your mission quota. Much like Monsters University, younger players will no doubt revel in its sanitised version of lawless GTA-style driving and booting trapped citizens off the top of skyscrapers for no apparent reason, but there’s little time to have fun when you’re constantly dogged by enemy robots.

Each Play Set does have a degree of replayability though, as each one has various additional sidekicks and villain figures you can buy on top of the three main characters in the starter pack. We didn’t receive any to review, but these additional characters will be able to interact with the world in slightly different ways to your starter pack figures as well as open their own character-specific treasure chests that are littered throughout each Play Set.

The Toy Box has the makings of a great multiplayer mode, but it comes at a great expense

You have to put in a lot of time and effort to build your Toy Box, then, but there’s no denying the creation process is a lot more fun once it’s not rattling around with empty mothballs. The building mechanics are a little fiddly for our liking (nothing snaps into place like you might expect so you’ll likely spend far more time lining things up than is truly necessary), but many hands make light work, as there’s also scope for playing with a friend via splitscreen co-op or up to four friends online. Just place another figure on the Infinity Base and a friend can join in instantly. They don’t even have to be from the same Play Set in order to work.

There’s a limit to how many objects you can place on one Toy Box world, but a handy green bar up the side of the screen keeps shows how much room you’ve got left to fill. We found filling it up to just 25% still packed in quite a substantial amount of stuff, so there should be plenty of scope for your creations. There’s room for an almost infinitesimal level of detail, too, once you have everything at your disposal, whether it’s driving a car through Monstro’s gaping jaws from Pinocchio or parking The Black Pearl right next to Scrooge McDuck’s money bin. You can change the pattern on your race tracks, add monster truck wheels to Cinderella’s carriage or use Power Discs (available in blind packs of two from £3 at www.amazon.co.uk) to change the background or add completely new items.

The Toy Box is the only place where different Disney franchises can cross over

If building worlds isn’t quite your idea of fun, there’s always the option of downloading worlds other players have made to play with direct from Disney. This works across all platforms, so you’ll be able to download different Toy Boxes regardless of which console you own and which console it was originally made on.

We’re not sure it’s all worth it, though, as the constant reminders of what you don’t have only serve to make you feel dissatisfied with your current lot. Disney Infinity has a brilliant premise and a huge amount of potential, but its execution is somewhat muddled. Its impressive open worlds are incredibly impressive, but it never quite lives up to the promises made in that opening tutorial. If future Play Sets continue to rely on tedious fetch quests and neglect the strengths of its respective franchises, it may struggle to amount to anything more than a Skylanders knock-off.