My hands on with Disney Infinity
Character transfer is a breeze. All you have to do is take the character you’re playing with off the module/pad that transports the toy into the game and put the toy you want to play with on the module/pad. That way, if you need a stronger character in a quick spot, then you can get him/her that fast. You can also give the toy power ups by placing different discs under the toy. They could range from taking less damage from attacks to gaining a resistance to certain attacks, stuff like that. Disney is going deep into their character roster for this game. Bolt the dog is on a power up disc so that shows that any Disney franchise could be brought into Infinity. It will be interesting to see if Star Wars eventually gets into the fun with Disney recently gaining the Star Wars property.
What you do to your character stays with your character. You can play the game with your friends and as long as you play with “your” character, the data will stay on that toy. Experience points earned will stay with that character for example. Whatever tasks you perform during play are stored on that character toy. Disney is also going to allow players to create and send in their Toy Box teams to their Internet server and the best ones will be available for others to see and play with. Disney will approve or disapprove the Toy Box teams in terms of being appropriate.
The controls for the game are pretty straightforward. I was playing the Xbox 360 version and steering Lightning McQueen was easy enough to learn. It felt strange at the start but once you get the hang of it, it feels like you’ve been driving cars in games this way for years. The use of the right thumb stich and the shoulder buttons to accelerate still feel wrong to me. Being a Nintendo guy, I’m used to accelerating with the A button but that’s just my opinion.
You gain experience by performing tasks and running things over, in the Cars universe anyway. The sparks you get from running things over go into experience and the other collected item, coins (don’t hold me to that) go to the Toy Box and you can use that to buy new things to play with. You’ll be able to buy news things for your characters to play with a create your own stories.. Also, there aren’t missions in Toy Box mode. Toy Box mode is there for players to have fun and to create some pretty cool situations for the Disney characters. It seems like every company is throwing their hat into the “ Toys storing data” race with Skylanders and Disney now and Pokémon in the future but it would appear that Disney is in it for the long haul and Infinity is a nice start.
