Disney Infinity review: Imagination land

Disney Infinity, powered by a treasure trove of characters, settings, stories and childhood memories, manages to deliver a game that isn't about any of those things.

Instead, Disney Infinity is about you. It is a toy box dumped onto your living room floor, brought to life by imagination, both yours and Disney's. That those precious items, packed away in the game, take so much effort, time and ultimately luck to unlock, is the game's one major stumbling block.

Infinity hopes to live up to its name. A play set brings with it two meticulously detailed plastic figures and a set piece. To access the content, a player places the figures and set piece on the Disney Infinity base and they are brought into the game. In the game, the play sets deliver two sorts of content: a fully themed open world packed with a campaign and quests, and new items for use in the game's player-created toy box worlds. While your own toy box creations can mash up settings and characters, these play sets are designed to be pure experiences. That means you can only use the characters from those play sets in their campaigns. Not a big deal unless you want to play multiplayer. The starter kit only has one character from each set, so if you want to play with a child or friend, you're going to have to plunk down some cash for new toys before you even get started.

This plays into one of Disney Infinity's biggest problems: Unlocking items for its Toy Box.

The Toy Box in Disney Infinity is a blank slate, a massive field designed to be filled up with your imagination or pre-loaded with the creations that come with the game. It is the most significant element of the game, the most fun and certainly the best reason to buy Disney Infinity. But after nearly 20 hours of play, beating three campaigns and then some, I still can't access the best bits of the Toy Box.

This is partly because I'm unlucky and because the game relies on luck to grant players full access to that virtual toy box of goodies. But where I found frustration, my son found enjoyment in the surprise, like the Toy Box rewards were loot drops in an MMO or RPG.

He also enjoyed the Disney Toy Box Vault's "spins." While players can unlock some items by playing through the campaigns, the bulk of those items, including the most powerful gadgets, have to be unlocked through "spins" in the Disney Toy Box Vault. Spins are earned when you level up characters, complete a campaign or complete an adventure, or you can find them in capsules spread throughout the Toy Box.

Creating is fairly simple. You flick through pages of categories and items with button presses via Disney Infinity's Spark mode; once selected you can rotate and place items, stacking them up to build your own creations or, in some cases, just using their creations as playing fields. That means you can flip through basic building blocks, enemies and villagers, decorative plants and items like signs, or use pieces from themed play sets, like race tracks, castles or towns. You can also unlock items that change the sky, spawn monsters or drop toy capsules.

On top of those many basic items, costumes and characters, Disney Infinity includes powerful objects that have pre-assigned simple, selectable behaviors. Players can connect these special items together and give them basic rules, like when someone steps on this tar trap, play music from that boom box, or when someone kicks that soccer ball into that goal, change the score on the scoreboard. There are also cameras you can unlock that will allow you to fix a perspective to create side-scrolling games or top-down games.

It feels like this is tied to a push to get gamers to buy more play sets, which is unfortunate if true. That Disney Infinity also supports power discs and item discs — add-ons that can be placed under a character's base to give them buffs or unlock new things — only strengthens that feeling when you have to buy them in blind packs. Either by bad luck or design, I was only able to unlock a few of these special items 20 or so hours into the game. That's a lot of spins, and a lot of bad luck.