Disney Infinity 3.0 (Wii U) Review – Starter Set

Reviewing a Toys to Life game is an interesting challenge, because moreso than any other game they’re a product as well as a creative work. They’re designed as a platform to be expanded upon with additional purchases, and end up costing a lot to unlock everything there is in the game. Thankfully, Disney Infinity 3.0 makes the job a lot easier by offering a solid, fulfilling game just in its starter set. It improves upon its predecessors in many ways, taking onboard a lot of the criticisms people had and using them to improve. The end result is a game that will entertain gamers young and old, and a starter pack that’s a satisfying package in its own right – you get a cool Star Wars game, a sandbox creation mode, and plenty of prebuilt content that allows you to bring in any of the characters you’ve bought in each game without restrictions.

The playset that comes with the starter set this time unlocks a story set during the Clone Wars period of Star Wars, and has Anakin Skywalker and Ahsoka Tano seeking out the one responsible for the Geonosian droid factories being reactivated. They’re joined by Obi-Wan Kenobi and Yoda, who are separate purchases (Darth Maul will be available sometime later as well). You’ll travel between four planets (Geonosis, Coruscant, Tatooine, and Naboo), undertaking missions and just messing around in the world of Star Wars. It’s a massive improvement over the playsets from 2.0 – it retains their size, but brings back the charm and fun that the playsets from 1.0 had. Each planet acts as an open world of varying sizes – Geonosis and Naboo are smaller worlds that are mainly designed just for their story missions, while Coruscant and Tatooine are much bigger and more encouraging of exploration.

The missions the game provides are relatively standard fare for the series – go here and kill these enemies, go and collect these items, climb this large structure etc. But the improved combat, combined with the sense of awe you feel when roaming the Star Wars universe, keeps them entertaining. It’s hard to say whether people who aren’t familiar with Star Wars (in particular the Clone Wars series and prequel trilogy) will get a similar level of enjoyment from the game, but fans will get a thrill from chasing Cad Bane through Coruscant and podracing in Mos Espa.

The focus of this playset is on lightsaber combat, showcasing the improvements to the combat system made by Ninja Theory. While on lower difficulties you can still get by with button-mashing, when playing on Hard or higher you’ll need to make use of new, unlockable combo strings. By altering the timing of your button presses you can activate different attacks that deal different amounts of damage and have differing effects. You can then combine these combos with Force Powers and ranged attacks, making for really interesting battles. Different enemies require different tactics to take out, for example Magnaguards will block a lot and require you to use block-breaking moves, while Death Watch commandos will continue to hit you with heavy firepower from the air until you ground them with Force moves.

It feels a lot like a genuine character action game that you’d expect from someone like Ninja Theory, and can act as a transition into harder such titles for less experienced gamers due to the way the game teaches you combo strings and helps signpost the timings in battle. There are some points though where the fights seem stacked on higher difficulties because you’ll have so many special enemies attacking you at once and it seems like you can’t possibly avoid all their attacks while also dispatching them all. Eventually you can unlock parrying abilities and more special attacks, but when you don’t have all of these at your disposal right away it can make some fights especially hard.

Combat is mixed up with platforming and vehicle sections. There’s a lot of variety in the playset, and it’s quite stunning how much there is to do. Coruscant alone feels like the whole Guardians of the Galaxy playset from 2.0 plunked into the game, and it’s just one of the planets. Even once you’ve finished the structured content you can mess around in the game world, doing things like hunting raiders in the deserts of Tatooine or feeding critters to a Sarlacc. There’s plenty of collectibles as well, but as in most games they just feel like a bit of filler. In 3.0 you can now even replay missions you’ve completed, so if you get more Star Wars figures later on you can play through the missions again with them.

All Star Wars characters can be used in the playset, but any villains and non-Clone Wars characters require you to find a ‘Champion Coin’ in the world to unlock the ability to play as them. These are like the Crossover Coins from 2.0 but much less of a pain to find. You only need one in order to allow a character into the world, and I encountered all of them while doing missions and sidequests. A much more intuitive system.

You don’t need any additional characters as all of the missions and sidequests can be completed with just Anakin and Ahsoka. However some of the collectibles and optional completion requirements for missions require extra characters. As far as I can tell these don’t affect any meaningful content and are just for unlocking concept art and saying you’ve done everything. Each character brings their own unique playstyles to the game, with different combos and special abilities. For example Darth Maul can activate special Sith powers when he successfully pulls off combos that boost his strength, while Olaf can run around trying to hug his enemies when you hold down the attack button.

In addition to all the action on the ground you can also fly a ship into space, with each planet also having a small area of space for you to fly around in. These feel a bit underutilised, as they’re mostly empty. Each system has a small asteroid or moon you can land on which will have a challenge for you, like navigating the terrain and collecting orbs within a time limit. Some systems are also used for a story mission or two, which are exciting. Dogfights with flying droids around giant starships are super cool and it would have been nice to see more (though I suspect we might do in the original trilogy playset). Apart from that all there really is to do is shoot asteroids and wait for a ‘random’ event. These events pop up as you’re flying around and provide something to do when you’re in space, but they’re always the same three on a random loop – you’ll either be attacked by Vulture Droids, have to assist freighters stuck in debris fields, or have to defend a transport ship from Vulture Droids. It ruins the illusion a little when you’re given the same tasks over and over in each system. It’s still cool to jump into your ship and blast some things every now and then, but it definitely feels like more could have been done with it.

In addition to the playset, the sandbox Toy Box mode returns, with its own heap of improvements. The first you’ll encounter is the Toy Box Hub. This serves as your introduction to the Toy Box, where you can learn about all of the game’s different mechanics and systems. The Hub is split into different themed areas that focus on a different aspect of the game, like a Tatooine desert where you can learn about vehicles, or a Halloween Town park where you can learn about combat. The Hub is somewhere that you can just constantly come back to and instantly jump into the bits of gameplay you enjoy most – if you like racing, there’s a racetrack set up around the level. If you like platforming, there’s a huge castle and Ewok village to climb around. New structures unlock over time, and gifts begin appearing for you to find. Sometimes there’s even random events like a parade outside of Disneyland castle.

Each section of the Hub also has a portal leading to prebuilt Toy Boxes. These Toy Boxes tutorials, minigames, and showcases of new tools, which you can participate in with any character. These are a great feature, as it means there’s always something you can do with your extra characters outside of the playsets. Since some of the characters can’t be used in any playsets, it’s good that there’s still value to be gained from them. This was something that was sorely missed in 2.0, as there wasn’t a lot you could really do with many of the figures. Now you can jump into plenty of prebuilt adventures that show you what’s possible within the Toy Box – you can race a pirate ship to Neverland, or save droids from Stormtroopers for instance.

One of the major elements of the Hub is the Farming area. Farming is a new mechanic that helps expand on the Sidekick system from 2.0. In the previous game, sidekicks were only really used within the Toy Box Games that were unlocked with special discs, and were only themed on generic thugs and Brave characters. Now there’s a variety of characters from Disney, Marvel, and Star Wars, who you can summon in the form of a little toy and team up with in the Toy Box. They follow you between Toy Boxes, keeping any equipment and upgrades you’ve given them, which makes you form a more personal connection with them. It’s awesome beefing up a little Darkwing Duck toy that follows you around and helps you out in battles.

The Farming system allows you to grow crops that boost your Sidekick’s stats, which will then allow them to perform better and equip better gear. By equipping your sidekicks with farming gear, they’ll begin to plant and nurture plants when in a farming area, which after time will be ready for you to harvest. As you improve your sidekicks and unlock better farming tools, you’ll get access to better crops. It’s a neat little distraction on the side that gives you something peaceful and passive to do, and it’s really cute seeing little Disney toys running around in farming gear growing plants. The stat and loot systems were obviously designed with Toy Box Takeover in mind (a dungeon crawler mode sold separately and included in some pre-orders), where you’ll need the boosts and where you’ll have the most access to loot chests. Without this extra mode the system does lose a bit of its lustre as you’ll have to grind away in some of the prebuilt Toy Boxes to get new gear, but the Sidekicks are still handy to have in battles and kids will likely love just playing around in the Farm.

Then, of course, there’s the whole creation aspect of the Toy Box. Using toys and tools that you’ve unlocked through gameplay, you can create your own levels and games to play with. It’s simple enough for kids and families to simply create towns and small worlds to enjoy, but for those with the patience to learn how all the systems work there’s a lot of power to experiment with. You can quickly unlock content from the previous games by placing your characters, playsets, and Toy Box Game discs on the portal, although these old playsets and Toy Box Games can’t be played. Toys returning from previous games can still be bought with in-game currency if this is your first Infinity game. On top of the old content there’s plenty of new things added as well – in particular, there’s heaps of Star Wars content now that the franchise has been fully incorporated into the series. Some of these require additional playsets to unlock, but others are available just with the Starter Set – I loved giving Spider-Man a lightsaber and making him pilot the Millennium Falcon. The Toy Box makes me feel incredibly nostalgic, bringing me back to my childhood when I’d spend ages playing with all my Star Wars toys.

The logic and game-making tools have seen improvements too. One of the prebuilt Toy Boxes in the Hub showed that it was possible to link fireworks to metronomes that synced up with the background music, but my experimentation found it was a lot to wrap my head around in the time I had to review the game. Some of the new tools I did make some progress with were the Path tool and the Boss Battle tool. The Path Tool allows you to place nodes around the level that form a path, which you can tie objects to. These objects will follow this path, allowing you to do things like fill a level with ambient vehicles driving around the roads. You can also create races from paths, allowing you to create off-road races that don’t restrict you to roads. The Boss Battle tool was more disappointing though, as it only allows you to use three Star Wars villains as bosses. When I heard about this feature I thought it’d be great to finally add some villain fights to my Toy Boxes, but it’ll only really be useful if you’re making Star Wars levels. It’s weird, because the Toy Box Takeover mode features many more bosses from Disney and Marvel, but you can’t use them in the Toy Box for whatever reason.

So how does 3.0 run on the Wii U? There were complaints last year that 2.0 struggled at times – this is true again, but it’s a lot less frequent this time around. There is some slowdown when playing the game with a friend split screen but there’s a lot going on here – especially on worlds like Coruscant and more complex Toy Box creations. The games frequent loading screens can be a little bit of a downer as well. It has to load a lot, and when it does you can hear it churning away at the disc in the console.

The Wii U does its hardest to bring you the best of 3.0 but there are times where it can look a little naff. There’s visible texture pop-in in the weirdest places, like when you’re jumping to Hyperspace and there’s literally nothing else around. The simple and consistent art style of Infinity though means that even though the characters are a little basic looking that’s actually how the toys are.

The Wii U GamePad is seldom used here again in 3.0. You can of course play the game entirely on the GamePad but the construction tools in the Toy Box don’t work on the second screen. If you’re not playing off-TV then the screen just shows what power discs you have on or your sidekick’s details. Your GamePad is also required to play the game – you can’t put the GamePad down and pick up a Pro Controller. The GamePad isn’t most child friendly controller out there so this would have been nice.

Disney Infinity 3.0 launches on September 3^rd on Wii U and non-Nintendo platforms. Josh played the game on PS4 while Vook played it on Wii U. Screenshots are taken from the Wii U version of the game. A separate Toy Box Takeover review will be coming soon.

Review continued below.