The winner of Gamesland’s Game of the Year award for 2013 is…Disney Infinity!
What? I hear you cry. Tomb Raider‘s on that list! Why doesn’t it get the award? Well, to be honest, I haven’t found To,b Raider all that good. It’s great, and enjoyable, but there’s just moments of frustration there that aren’t in Disney Infinity.
Disney Infinity is great because it works. It’s taken a bunch of formulas from other games and suited them to it’s own needs. There’s a Grand Theft Auto-esque Incredibles campaign, a Splinter Cell stealth-like Monsters University campaign, and a an original Pirates of the Carribean campaign, which had a great canon mechanic. The game lets you experience these movies in a unique way; although the game has several mechanics from other games, the stories, locations, and ideas are original, and have that patented Disney magic. The game wasn’t without its flaws, but sometimes they make the game more enjoyable. For example, in the final big boss battle in the Pirates campaign, the reticule didn’t appear for me to shoot the ships, so I had to guess. It was weird, unexpected and unintentional, but it was enjoyable because I still managed to beat the boss.
I once saw (in a forum) that someone had bought nearly every character for their kids in Skylanders, but didn’t want to spend money on Infinity because it gave you levels with the characters; that the game was charging for content. There’s a few things wrong with that sentence. One, the fact that the larent was content to buy nearly every character for a game where nearly every character is identical if they belong to the same type. Two, Disney Infinity is complete. The campaign time is about six hours for each world (depending what level of completion you want), meaning that the total singleplayer campaign length is about 18 hours. For comparison, the latest Call of Duty game, Ghosts, has a total singleplayer campaign length of six hours, and the first Skylanders game had 22 levels, with each level taking approximately half an hour, so the game was about 11 hours in length. So playing all of Call of Duty: Ghosts and Skylanders: Spyro’s Adventure would tale the approximate time to finish Infinity.
Disney Infinity also has four-player online co-op, the ability to download worlds made by other people, and more RLC (Real Life Content, well, at least that’s what I call it) coming in the future. That means a lot of play time.
Congratulations, Disney Infinity. You are Gamesland’s Game of the Year for 2013.
Gamesland 