No spoilers, but watch the comments!
Disney Infinity 3.0 was a pleasant surprise, but I was infinitely more excited at the prospect of experiencing the original trilogy and the Force Awakens Play Set than the base Clone Wars-centric game. This weekend, I had the chance to play the latter.
Having just seen the film as well I’ll keep spoilers light — basically, the desert planet Jakku exists, as do the two characters shown in every trailer and advertisement (Rey and Finn).
The Force Awakens Play Set is a slightly different re-telling compared to the film. This is a fairly standard strategy employed by Star Wars games, and my goodness, it works. I literally jumped into Infinity right after arriving back from the theater, and could notice a number of different storytelling liberties, as well as new locations. Simply put, you’re going to see more of Jakku and augment your enjoyment of the movie with the same basic narrative. As is the case with all of the recent Play Sets, the focus is on open world exploration with a mission-based setup, which works wonderfully well with split-screen co-op.
Both players are free to do whatever they want, undertaking their own individual missions, or working together as they see fit. The main gimmick of Jakku is scrap, which can be located around the map and used to repair areas that house secrets or power-ups. In addition to a lengthy campaign across multiple planets and uncharted space, each Awakens character (Finn, Rey, Poe, Kylo Ren) still has their own unique skills to level up, and there’s 100 hidden mynocks to locate across the course of the game. The actors from the film also reprise their roles, which is great.
Thankfully the character crossover feature has been streamlined in 3.0, so all you need to do to bring in a legacy character (like Boba Fett, Darth Vader, or Luke) is to find one solitary coin, instead of a series of them like 2.0. This was always present in 3.0, but it’s even more appreciated now that the Star Wars cast has grown so much since launch. There’s also a few extras thrown in there like a rudimentary Geometry Wars style mini-game.
If you have a friend, spouse, or child who enjoys Star Wars and you’ve seen the film together, Disney Infinity 3.0 manages to recapture a lot of that magic. While I don’t think it’s the best Star Wars movie to date, it was still incredibly entertaining, and I’m really looking forward to seeing what Rian Johnson can do in the next iteration.
