PLAYING: Disney Infinity 2.0 - Avengers
I’m not super serious about playing through this. But I have to admit that it’s a surprising experience.
My wife and I are “Disney People”. That means we value the good things about Disney. We still condemn the bad parts. It’s a grey world to live in. But anyway, when we were poor and in Florida, we had our first year anniversary without much money or ability to celebrate. So we bought Disney Infinity 1.0. We liked playing the Lego Games, but we’d run out by this point. This seemed like a good opportunity to play an accessible game together. We started with Pirates of the Caribbean. I was impressed by how big it was--but my wife wasn’t that into it. So it just didn’t get played. When 3.0 came out with Star Wars, I had to have it. I played through the classic trilogy game--whatever it’s called. It was fun. But it too was forgotten over time. Since I was on a Star Wars kick in 2021, I thought I might repurchase 3.0 on PC to play all the Star Wars stories. But there was a discount on all three games. And they come with everything unlocked! So now here we are...
I was hoping this game was multiplayer so my kids could play. It’s not multiplayer. I let them take turns as Iron Man. I’m really impressed with how deep the leveling system is. They could have skipped all this and no one would have missed it. But it being there gives the game some unexpected depth. It’s not required to enjoy the game, but it does give it “more”. Once the kids got into the open-world city, I was impressed that Iron Man could fly around (just like in the Lego Games). Just gives the whole game a strong sense of freedom.
My kids, it turns out, are psychopaths. As they took turn exploring the city, they actually took turns destroying it. While I know they were just being kids and exploring and responding to bright lights. It was disturbing them to take such maniacal joy in the destruction of cars and municipal property. At one point, my daughter made her voice very deep and said, “I. Am. Iron Man. I’m her to save the world...from CARS!” and then blew up a bunch of cars.
On another day, I was playing as my kids watched. I decided I wanted to try the story out and enjoy the game. As they watched me move about the city they kept telling me to blow up cars. Jeez kids...
The story is...I don’t know. I think Loki brought in ice giants to freeze things. I’m sure he’s doing something bad and we gotta stop them. It’s not very deep, and that’s fine. It’s there to give some context for you to enjoy bashing ice giants. Honestly, this is what I want from an Open World game. Freedom to do whatever I want with quests being glimpses into the story that pieces together nicely. Will this piece together nicely? Probably not, but it at least doesn’t over stay it’s welcome.
The gameplay is accessible, but occasionally frustrating. Combat has been pretty easy--but it also seems focused on 1-on-1 combat. So you have kill each enemy one at a time. And they don’t die quickly. It’s button mashing with almost no strategy. For a games aimed at families, this is wise, but I would prefer lower health or being able to hit more than one enemy at a time.
It’s fun that they have vehicles in the game, but the driving feels unresponsive. It goes from not turning enough to turning way too much with little in-between. But it doesn’t ruin the experience.
Really, the game feels like a Lego game. And that’s good. That’s exactly who they should rip off. But unlike Lego games, the levels aren’t very clever. Go here, bash this, push that. The fact that they’ve given the game linear structure is holding it back. But I’m sure that also keeps it from being confusing for kids. I’d rather they just put a bunch of mission/activities around the map and you go at it at your own pace. But this game is nearly 10 years old. No one cares.
I’m trying to focus more on making games than playing games, so I don’t expect to jump into this much. We’ll see.
