After last week’s figure binge, I spent a little more time this weekend with the game part of Disney Infinity 2.0. Specifically, I played through the Spider-Man playset campaign and then Escape from the Kyln, which was one of the “Toybox games” included in the initial box.

I didn’t originally realize that the Toybox game pieces WERE games, because they look like the terrain modifier pieces you use for building toyboxes. I don’t have any particular interest in the creative side of DI, so I’d just stuck them on a shelf and forgotten about them.

There’s not a lot TO Escape from the Kyln; it’s a set of eight Guardians of the Galaxy-themed levels, all of which revolve around solving collecting keys to unlock gates while fending off a mix of Frost Giants, Venom Symbiotes, and, uh, the aliens from GotG whose name I can never remember. Those guys. It lets you use any Marvel character, so I used it as a convenient way to take all of the figures I hadn’t used during the playsets and get them to level 4 or 5, unlocking their Special move, Mid-Air Recovery, and Street Spike along the way.

Loki’s Special is a particularly fun one, by the way. It turns him invisible and creates a duplicate Loki who serves as a decoy to draw the attention of everything you’re fighting, so all of your opponents go and beat on your decoy while you hit them in their newly-undefended backsides.

The Spider-Man playset was a little more ambitious in terms of story and had some of the most engaging gameplay of the Marvel playsets. It was also the most straightforward set to unlock crossover characters in – I had the Hulk and Iron Man crossover coins collected within the first few minutes past the introduction.

It had an uncharacteristically difficult boss fight very early on, and it had several out-of-place rail shooter segments, but web-lining around as Spider-Man was too fun to hold any real grudge against the weirder bits. I got a particular kick out of being able to grab pedestrians and hold them under one arm as you swing around; it was an unexpected tribute to the Amazing Fantasy cover.

After finishing up Spider-Man and Escape from the Kyln, I went back to the earlier playsets and did all of the crossover character missions. For the most part, they didn’t add a whole lot to any of the playsets, but the Nova crossover mission in the Avengers playset actually had a cutscene and a tiny bit of story added to it, so that one is worth unlocking.

None of the DI 2.0 games were particularly amazing on their own, and needing to buy toys to unlock content that’s already stored on the disk is… questionable. Still, the tactile nature of the toys and the sense of ownership you get from leveling Your Own Personal Elsa is kind of compelling.

Side note: We’ve been working on a project where we convert one of the stray cats we feed into a garage cat, and so far it has been going fairly well… barring the part where he decided to show his appreciation by leaving a mouse head on the mat outside the kitchen door. No, Ned, we don’t believe you when you say that it’s the “best part.”