After a middling year full of Marvel’s most popular superheroes, Disney Infinity is getting ready to explore a galaxy far, far away with its Star Wars-focused 3.0 Edition. It’s a new game for a new year, and one that showed impressively while on E3 2015’s show floor.
Last year, I had a hard time recommending Disney Infinity 2.0: Marvel Super Heroes to anyone but the diehards amongst us, as it was far from great. In fact, what should’ve been a step forwards following a great debut ended up being a notable step backwards. The wonder, whimsy and inventiveness that made us want to explore the original game was mostly missing, with a bland and repetitive beat ’em up formula having taken its place. As such, it truly seemed as if Disney had lost its way a mere year after delivering a very solid and memorable Skylanders challenger.
Having invested so much time into beating the two previous games, getting hands-on time with Disney Infinity 3.0 was a must for me. It’s a goal that I made good on, too, thanks to a guided appointment through Disney Interactive’s large booth.
With a helpful Canadian representative at my wing, I explored four different aspects of the Disney Infinity 3.0 experience, those being classic Star Wars, cartoon Star Wars, racing and Villain Takeover. Actually, the only thing that I didn’t go hands-on with was the game’s new Inside Out-themed play set, which takes the form of a 2D platformer.
Let’s start talking about what I did play, though. And if we’re going in order, that means we’ll need to start with classic Star Wars. The Rise Against the Empire play set, if you will.
While I waited for my appointment to start, my eyes were glued to the on-screen action as someone else demoed Rise Against the Empire. After all, being someone who’s loved Star Wars since grade school, I essentially grew up with the adventures of Luke and Leia Skywalker, not to mention their compadres Han Solo and Chewbacca. To me, the Original Trilogy is one of the greatest licenses out there, not to mention one of film’s best and brightest.
Rise Against the Empire placed me on Hoth, during The Empire Strikes Back‘s iconic wintry battle. There, I used my Jedi abilities to force push, slash and shoot enemy Stormtroopers as they spawned around my six. We weren’t alone on the whitewashed battlefield, however, because hulking walkers threatened to step on us with every aching movement. They were next on my list, for sure, but I’d wanted to take out all of the humanoids before moving on to anything bigger.
The on-foot combat wasn’t crazily deep, but I didn’t mind that. After all, this is Disney Infinity 3.0, not a triple-A action/adventure game set in the Star Wars universe. Accessibility and responsiveness are keys to a game such as this, and those are two things that this one has in spades.
