First Impressions Disney Infinity 2.0: Avengers Play Set
Last week, we discussed Disney Infinity 2.0, in general. This week, we're taking a look at the Avengers Play Set, which is the play set you get when you buy the game. In this play set, the Avengers have to stop Loki from using Frost Giants to freeze New York City. Punch your way to victory! I played this game on Xbox One. Now, you know I own one.
The package comes with the game, the Infinity base to put your figures on, the Avengers play set token, two mini-game tokens, and three figures: Iron Man, Thor, and Black Widow.
Right off the bat, the first thing I noticed was that if you collect 10 Sam Alexander or Rocket Raccoon tokens, spread throughout the city, you can use that character in the play set. So, the first thing I did was spend some time finding those tokens. They weren't too hard to find, but it did take some time. The fine folks at Disney gave me a Rocket figure at San Diego Comic Con, and I desperately wanted to use it. After some running around, I finally got to use Rocket and all was right with the world.
My first experience with this game really had nothing to do with progressing the story. Sure, after I unlocked Rocket, it also unlocked some side missions, which was pretty cool, but once again, an open world experience distracts me from the regular game.
As far as the story goes, it gets pretty repetitive, pretty quickly. You head to one of the people you can collect tasks from and you have to go to somewhere in the city and do one of three things: fight some Frost Giants, escort someone/something while fighting Frost Giants, travel somewhere to destroy/fix something while fighting Frost Giants. While occasionally you get to travel somewhere else (to fight Frost Giants), that's about all you do and once you figure that out, the game loses a ton of its appeal.
Now, don't get me wrong, the game is a ton of fun. It's just VERY simplistic and that's something that translates into the game play. Get ready to hit the Y button, a lot because that's basically your main attack. You can also fire whatever weapon you have at your disposal using the right trigger. There's other controls, like jump, but you'll spend most of your time hitting the punch button. Essentially, gameplay is about button mashing. There is very little skill. However, things get EXTREMELY frustrating during boss battles and they can be unforgivable at times, even when the difficulty gets turned down to easy. I hate you, Loki. Seriously. The three characters that come with the set do play differently. They each have their strengths and weakness, but it was sad to say that Black Widow came up a bit short. She wasn't has fun to use as Iron Man and Thor were. She played a bit stiff compared to Thor and Iron Man who were a bit more fluid and fun to watch fight.
As far as the setting goes, it looks great. You're in the Marvel Universe version of Manhattan. It's a lotsmaller than the real one, but there are landmarks you may know, like Avengers Tower. Yes, you can fly to the Statue of Liberty, and yes, I did that.
What really won me over was the character design and overall fun that Infinity had to offer. All of these extremely familiar Marvel characters have been Disney-fied and they look awesome. I love what the design team did with these characters. They added a big sense of fun to them as well. Graphics for the game look fantastic, except in the one or two cases where the camera zooms in and you notice some pixelization. Not a big deal though. Everything else looked great.
What makes it even better is that we have physical figures to go along with them.Yes, these figures are a HUGE money-suck, singles costing $14 and two-packs, with a whole new play set, costing $33. However, the design is great, and while I've seen other reviews complaining about how the figures look, the four I have look fantastic. It really is nice having a physical object go with the game and something that looks cool on your shelf, when you're inevitably tired with the game down the road.
When it all comes down to it, the target demographic for this game is not me. This is for kids. However, it is a game for kids that holds my attention. While the Avengers Play Set doesn't really hold my attention, it would be a blast to play with a kid. Grab your son or daughter, niece or nephew, little brother or sister and have some fun. To put it bluntly, it's a kids game that doesn't suck. It also has some game mechanics that cater to the adult crowd like collecting certain items in order to unlock items for the toy box, for you completionists out there (By the way, Toy Box is super awesome and the best part of the game). Also, there's a skill tree where you can level up certain aspects of your character, like adding their super-moves, upgrading health, etc.
The Avengers Play Set packs a lot of fun into a game. Yeah, it's pretty tedious and redundant and there's little skill, but overall, it is a fun beat-em-up that reminds me of a more complex Final Fight with sweet looking characters. As for my recommendation, I'm a bit down the middle. The game alone is pricey and adding in figures can make it even worse. If you were excited about this game, I say pick it up, but if you were on the fence, wait for it to go on sale somewhere and then pick up.
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