It’s expensive, but fun.
The ‘toys to life’ genre was a strange trend in the middle of the 2010s. For a while, you couldn’t walk into a game store without seeing a huge pile of colorful plastic figures. They took over the market almost as quickly as they came out. The idea is pretty simple: you buy a toy of the character you want to play as, put it on a portal that’s provided, and then you beam that character into the game with all the joy of a kid. Both collectors and users of toys fell in love with them.
As expected, businesses quickly saw how profitable this was, and by 2016, the market was completely full. Take a look at some of the most famous examples of this trend.
Starlink: Battle For Atlas
Ubisoft’s entry into the toys-to-life genre came out in 2018, which is the very meaning of “late to the party.” This is two whole years after interest in the genre was at its most “muted.” Because of this, it was a huge failure, and sets for the game are hard to find these days. It’s too bad, because the title is pretty good.
You play a deep-space pilot as part of the Starlink program. Your goal is to speed across the galaxy doing research, fighting bad guys, and basically earning your Boy Scout patches.
There are a lot of crazy pilots to choose from. Mason, who comes with the basic kit, is about as mild-mannered as it gets. But there are other characters, like the killer Shaid, the caring robot Judge, and the smart lizard-like creature Kharl. People with a Nintendo Switch could even choose Fox McCloud, which was a cool mix that probably helped sales on that system.
It was too little, though. Ubisoft didn’t trust the toy gathering part very much, so they made it mostly optional by letting you buy digital versions of the characters and ship parts instead. Putting together your own ship (wings, guns, and cockpits could be snapped off and on again, which showed up right away in the game) was really cool, but having it attached to the controller was annoying and hard to use.
Starlink is great as a space travel sim, but it’s sad to see it as the end of a whole genre.
Skylanders
You can’t say enough good things about Activision’s Skylanders series. It was the big hit that started the whole toy-to-life business. Because the creators of Spyro the Dragon wanted to start the series over for the umpteenth time, they took a chance: would people really buy more after spending $70 on the beginning pack? The answer was a loud, booming “yes.”
As of 2011, when you played Spyro’s Adventure, which is a bad name because you didn’t have to play as Spyro, you became the Portal Master of Skylands.
Let me explain. The bad guy Kaos turned the heroes of this world, the Skylanders, into statues and sent them to Earth. They were trapped in toy shops and sold for $15 each, but that part wasn’t included in the ads, which I found strange. Once you’re freed and put on the portal, you’ll go through a series of action-platforming stages, each one based on a different Skylander character. Kids, better hope you have one of those characters!
Putting aside cynicism, the gaming loop is definitely fun. Fight, gain levels, and then spend in-game money on improvements that let you fight and gain levels even more. With each new release, there was something new to discover. Giants and big people. Trap Team, a link that talks. Vehicles with superchargers. In the end, six games in five years were too many for players and parents to handle, but fans will always love the series.
Amiibo
Nintendo, who is always looking for ways to make money and has a history of making toys, threw their red plumber hat into the ring with a line of “Amiibo” figures and quickly grabbed the market. Of the big toy-to-life brands, this is the only one that’s still going strong in an important way. It may have been able to stay in business so long because it was versatile, which none of its competitors were.
They look cool, but you can’t really do much with them besides play the games they’re made for, unless you want to use them to collect dust on your desk. In the end, all they’re doing is getting to information that’s already on the disc. This is fixed by Amiibo, which doesn’t tie the toys to a specific game. Instead, they unlock cool little extras in a huge number of Nintendo games.
You’ll be able to save and fight human ghosts in Smash Bros. Use them as game pieces in Mario Party. In Mario Kart, they let you dress up as Mii. So on. This way, Nintendo has made sure that figures you got years ago will still work with newer games, making them more useful. This, along with the steady release of new figures, makes people feel like they “gotta have ’em all,” which means that Amiibo will be around for a while longer.
Disney Infinity
Everyone wasn’t shocked that Disney, a huge entertainment company, wanted a piece of the toys-to-life pie. Especially since they had been trying for almost ten years to break into the big world of video games with failed projects like Epic Mickey and Disney Universe. So, Disney Infinity was supposed to be the ultimate celebration of the Mouse House by letting you mix figures from different IPs into a crazy mess.
Play Sets and Toy Box were the two main parts of the Disney Infinity experience. The Play Sets were full campaigns for the shows they were based on (Monsters, Inc., Cars, Pirates of the Caribbean, etc.), and they were a lot of fun. The Toy Box, on the other hand, was like Minecraft for kids.
If you had the right unlockables and were patient enough, you could make any kind of magical world you could think of. Do you want to see Woody and Davy Jones race Lightning McQueen on top of the Epcot ball? You have the power to make it happen. It was a lot of fun to play other makers’ levels in the online mode for hours on end.
From 2013 to 2016, three more Disney Infinity games came out. 2.0 added Marvel superheroes, and 3.0 added Star Wars and a whole kart-racing game made by Sumo Digital. Costs of making the game were too high in the end, and Disney had to cancel the project. However, many people still love Infinity.
LEGO Dimensions
By far, LEGO Dimensions was the most ambitious of the big toys-to-life games. This plan was to take the idea of crossover in Disney Infinity and make it a thousand times better, but not just with Disney-owned properties. Travellers’ Tales, the company that made this game, tried to get any brand they could get their hands on for it. DC Comics, Back to the Future, Lord of the Rings, Portal, Scooby Doo, Doctor Who, Ghostbusters, Sonic the Hedgehog, Adventure Time, and a lot more were all in this.
One of the best things about Dimensions was that the figures and cars were made from real LEGO, which is a well-known and trusted toy brand. Outside of Slope Game, it was easy to add them to your current LEGO builds. Luckily, they were also pretty cool in the game.
Dimensions let people make silly mashups. There is no other place where you can see the Doctor talking about jelly babies with Homer Simpson or Sonic talking about his days as a Werehog with Marceline the Vampire Queen.
The action that held it all together was typical TT LEGO fun: jumping from platform to platform and collecting studs was still the norm. By the time the last update came out in 2017, Dimensions was huge, with 30 different worlds to explore and a huge number of tasks in each one.
The game failed because it used real LEGO, which raised costs, and the toys-to-life bubble burst. However, many players are still calling for a digital re-release. It would be a shame to keep such an incredibly crazy project running on old gear.