Disney's Skylanders? Disney's Skylanders!

Well it's not surprising with the massive success of Skylanders that someone else would come along and try to do their own spin on the formula of a game supported by collectible action figures. That Disney is doing and looking like it really is it's own beast is great for a lot of reasons. The great thing about Skylanders is that while it could've been a really lazy product, it has some really solid gameplay under the hood, but the gameplay isn't all that varied and unless you really get into collecting a lot of the figures, you can easily get away with only having about 8 characters, because beyond that they don't add much to the game.

From the video and press release not only does the gameplay seem a lot more varied, but obviously the possibilities for characters and sets are almost limitless. I mean sure, you have the obvious Disney properties like the films & TV shows but things can get really crazy when you add the recently acquired Marvel & Lucas Arts properties to the mix. The fact that new "stories" apparently come with each set seems to add huge expansion possibilities and a real reason to pick up lots of new characters.

So as someone who really enjoys Skylanders I can certainly say I'm pretty excited about this and almost completely sold and excited about it. Except for one thing that may literally be a dealbreaker for me. One of the great things about Skylanders is it's light rpg elements. It's fun to level up your characters and earn upgrades through in-game money. Disney Infinity either scales back the focus on that or abandons it entirely for discs that you buy that give characters certain boosts. So this could mean a couple of things. Hopefully, they just provide some stat boosts that are hardly necessary. But if they are practically necessary and characters don't really progress otherwise in any meaningful way, this concept could lose quite a bit of its appeal. So the game could live or die on this idea of discs. I'm hopeful that it's a great product that I will spend plenty of money on. We'll see for sure as more information comes out on the next 5 or so months til its release.

That's really it for today, I'll try and get a third post for the week in tomorrow or Friday, until then here's your FREE GAME OF THE WEEK: Ray & Cooper