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Last year I spent what some may consider an inappropriate amount of energy breaking down Disney Infinity. Which is a criticism I’m not sure I agree with - I think we need more criticism of all sorts of games, but especially kids games where comparatively little is written either because expectations are so low or because they don’t tend to tap into a lot of relatable adult problems. And I felt that I needed to revisit Disney Infinity because the new version addresses most - not all, but most - of my complaints from that previous video. Maybe not all of them have been addressed well, but in general the issues that made Disney Infinity such a mess have largely been cleared up.

First of all, the dichotomy between the two halves of the game, between the playsets and the toybox, feels a bit more well defined this time around. In Disney Infinity 1 the playsets had solid mechanics and goals but mostly illusory creative aspects like reskinning houses and NPCs for no reason, and the toy box had a bunch of creative features but lacked a decent mechanical framework to explore those creations with. This time around they’ve mostly removed the creative aspects from the playsets - you won’t get missions to reskin Avengers tower or put a hat on a random NPC anymore. Instead the focus is on being what they always felt like they were - a passable PS2-era licensed action adventure title. And I don’t mean that as an insult - it’s actually a sort of game that doesn’t exist much anymore as development costs and multi-year development cycles have made movie-tie-in games really hard to do. A kid-friendly beat-up-a-bunch-of-guys-and-buy-an-upgrade sort of game.

But they’ve made some tweaks to that formula to make them a little more interesting. Death, for example, has been completely reworked. In Disney Infinity 1, if you died you just sort of poofed back into existence after losing a little experience. This meant that the playsets were easily beaten by spamming the attack button; whatever experience you lost from death you’d inevitably gain back when the enemies were defeated. But now if a character is defeated in a playset you either have to restart the mission from scratch or use a different character from that playset. This makes death matter just enough - the game’s not hard by anyone’s standards, but you do have to pay attention now if you want to keep playing as your favorite character.

And you probably will have a favorite character this time out. Disney Infinity 1.0 had a wonderful cross-section of Disney properties, but each playset’s characters tended to play more or less the same. Pirates have guns and swords. Cars drive around. Monsters scare people. The Incredibles…. well, the Incredibles had a lot of different powers, but they’re super heroes. And Marvel’s heroes, too, have a variety of distinct abilities. There’s the obvious stuff like movement - webslinging, wall crawling, flying, and relying on vehicles all give characters different sense of motion. But combat has a lot of subtle touches that make each character feel unique. Thor, for example, can throw his hammer and, while it’s sailing through the air, pummel people with his fists until he gets it back. Even similar moves feel different: Spider-Man’s ranged attack is a light stun without any oomph, Iron Man’s is a moderate blast, and Rocket Raccoon has guns that knock people up and around. Every character feels like they have their own specialties, and those subtle differences give them a mechanical identity, which feels new to this series and is definitely appreciated.

And you can build on those different identities using the new upgrade system, which is exciting to me for two reasons. First, it means character progression actually means something - you’re buffing a character’s health or melee or ranged attacks, or even their unique special move. These stats didn’t exist in the last game, and it’s a nice way to emphasize that this is your Iron Man or your Gamora. But the bigger reason to like the new upgrade system is that it breaks out character progression from unlocks in the toybox. In Disney Infinity 1.0 the only reason to level up was to gain spins against the Disney Infinity Vault for toys. The vault was the only way to unlock a lot of the toys, and the toy you unlocked would be random. With a level cap of 15, each $13.99 Disney Infinity figure represented at most 15 chances at getting random crap, which I called out as being rather insidious. This time they’ve broken that out - you collect orange sparks to level your character up and buff their skills, and blue sparks are used to purchase toybox goodies. This means that even one character can theoretically grind through most of the unlockables in the game, and players now get to choose whether they want race tracks, terrain pieces, or city building toys to use in the toybox.

Speaking of the toybox: They’ve expanded the creativitools suite giving players the ability to create fully featured game levels with collecting mechanics or timed mechanics or combat mechanics that can actually result in a win that ends the game. And they’ve also added a text feature, giving players the ability to tell their own stories or write their own narratives, as well as a feature that lets players link different levels together. The result is the ability to create your own little campaign, which people have already started to do. Check out this level where Hulk has gotten sick and Nick Fury uses a Pym particle to shrink you down and find out what could possibly make the green guy ill.

They’ve even added a lot of features to make that creation easier. You can choose from a few toybox algorithms when making a new toybox and the game will automatically populate a city or jungle or rolling terrain. Or you can place builders in the world - little AI agents you put down that perform the same algorithms more slowly so that you can correct things as they build or move them to where you want your city or jungle to be constructed. And as you unlock creativitoy pieces the game will automatically grant you access to prefab games. So if you buy all the tools needed to make a 2D platformer the game will grant you access to a side-scroller prefab that has all those tools laid out, requiring only that you place them.

The creation tools have finally started to feel like something you can express yourself in. You still have to fight a comparatively awful interface, but now you’re wrestling with a GUI and not the fundamental limitations of the creation engine. And even the GUI is at least a little better with the addition of features like an Undo button which I still can’t believe the first game shipped without.

After playing Disney Infinity 2.0 it’s hard not to see the first edition as something of a beta; an unfinished toybox and a mishmash of mechanics the developers were experimenting with. But for the first time I think we’re starting to see a picture of what Disney Infinity really is. The game’s constantly compared to Skylanders for its little plastic characters, and yeah, I still think that model asks people to spend way too much money. But really, the heart of the game isn’t collecting plastic figures - at least not anymore. Now it’s Little Big Planet if Little Big Planet idolized Disney characters and beat’em ups instead of a do-it-yourself aesthetic and platformers. I probably spent too many of my teenage hours playing stuff like Spiderman 2 and Wolverine’s Revenge, but the idea that kids today aren’t just consuming fluffy nothing action games but have the toolsets to make their own and tell their own stories within them? That’s kind of exciting.