Disney Infinity review

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.