Concomitant to the release of the wildly successful blockbuster of the same name, Disney Infinity launched their third Star Wars playset: “Star Wars: The Force Awakens.”

The playset ships with characters Rey and Finn, with Kylo Ren and Poe available separately.

An associated power disc pack contains Poe’s Resistance Jacket, Resistance Tactical Strike, Quad Jumper, and Finn’s Stormtrooper Costume.

*POTENTIAL SPOILERS FOR “STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS”*

As far as the gameplay is concerned, there aren’t a whole lot of surprises for players who have already run through the previous two Star Wars playsets. Ironically, just as the movie is thought to be closely related to “A New Hope,” the structure of “The Force Awakens” playset runs very similar to that of “Rise Against the Empire.” It starts off with a pretty fast and succinct retelling of the first half-hour or so of the film, and then passes from a tutorial mission to an open-ended quest to raise money by doing odd jobs for denizens of Jakku. Once off Jakku you meet up with Han (who appears to have aged a little more in the game than he did IRL) who takes you to Takodana.

From the looks of it, Han’s taking us to eat at Rainforest Cafe.

After finding Maz Kanata, and doing a series of missions for her benefit, you engage in a fairly large-scale space battle. You then infiltrate a ship and eventually meet up with Kylo Ren in a final series of increasingly difficult boss battles.

I talked a little bit about the specifics of playset gameplay when Disney Infinity came out with their first two Star Wars sets here. Most of it is still true here, with a few tweaks.

Some random thoughts:
–Another layer is added to the never-ending accumulation of wealth by giving the characters the capacity to scavenge random debris around the various areas, as Rey starts off doing in the movie.
–I’m not sure whether it’s just that I’m now more familiar with the controls, but I felt this playset did a better job of explicitly demonstrating the basic commands than the other ones during the initial demo.
–I am a pretty poor shot as a starship gunner.
–Like Henry Jones Sr. bad.
–Another level of complexity is that not every character seems to have the same equivalent capabilities, causing some missions to stall out temporarily if, say, you just killed off all your characters with the hacking ability.
–Like all the other games, the auto-targeting is a little fickle. You can shoot a guy nine times, and then all of a sudden your character may decide they’d rather aim at a wall or a hapless bystander.
–Interesting to see how with time, the game has morphed from a fairly basic platformer to a straightforward RPG.
–Once again, it’s a Good Thing to have as many figures as possible to interchange. Some of the battles are huge and long and there’s no way to save, so if you kill off all your characters, you’ll be put back at the last checkpoint…which is a pain if you were almost at the end of the fight.
–Being able to use as many of the Star Wars characters as you can find Champion Coins enables you to stage some pretty bizarre match-ups. Towards the end, I found one battle where I couldn’t put a dent in Kylo Ren using Rey, Darth Vader, or Kylo Ren.

All in all, it’s a fun game that anyone who enjoyed the movie should appreciate. It carefully skirts some of the larger dramatic points and mysteries of the film (example: After your big missions with Han, he simply isn’t seen after a certain point. We can only assume he’s living comfortably in a farm, out in the country) in favor of yielding an arguably more satisfying conclusion, which is probably appropriate for a video game.

The Star Wars: The Force Awakens Play Set will be available at a suggested retail price of $34.99. Poe Dameron and Kylo Ren character figures (MSRP: $13.99 each) and Star Wars: The Force Awakens themed Power Disc Pack (MSRP: $9.99) will be sold separately.