Well this is a game I wasn’t too sure about. When I saw the developers talking about it in interviews and such, it sounded AWESOME. Seeing gameplay videos made it seemed sort of boring to play. So this is a game I really wanted to rent just to see how it was…

So read on and see if it’s as awesome as the developers have been saying! This is more of an impressions post since I didn’t get to the end, but I did go a good way through.

Developer: Junction Point
Publisher: Disney Interactive Studios
Date of Release: November 30th 2010
Platforms: Nintendo Wii

Genre: 3D Platformer
Rated E for Everyone

What is good about this game

Presentation
One thing I love is old cartoons. Old Disney cartoons in particular are really fun to look at. As the game is all based on old Disney cartoons, or discarded designs, I love this. It’s really colorful, and the classic Disney character designs actually look really awesome in 3D. The animation is splendid too, mimicking the classic Disney feel. The overall look of the game is just great. You visit a variety of areas, each with a slightly different feel, and, if you’re a Disney nut, you might find that almost everything you see in the game is from some old Disney cartoon, as obscure as it might be (or sometimes real world memorabilia, like lunch boxes, phones or Mickey Mouse video games). The overall look is also pretty dark, as you’re travelling through a corrupted/destroyed version of this world that was made to house forgotten/discarded Disney areas/characters, so things have a fairly grim look to them too. It’s immensely colorful while fittingly dark at parts, making for various styles of visuals. Just fantastic.

Exploration
The game, while very straightforward, has very exploration-based gameplay. The 3D platforming is sort of reminiscent to something like Banjo-Kazooie, where you have to look around for hidden stuff, finding various collectibles and doing some actually well done platforming. The use of paint and thinner is also fun as it makes finding hidden collectibles an extra challenge, since you can find different things to paint to be able to get to different places, or thinner to “open” walls. Every area has different platforming styles and you get different powers like summoning TVs and various other things to affect enemies or the environments. The paint and thinner will also play roles in actually interesting puzzles and platforming segments. Really good stuff here.

Things I’m neutral about

Story
The overall plot is nice. Yen Sid (the wizard from Fantasia) just built a special world inhabited by rejected Disney character designs, or forgotten characters (ruled by Mickey Mouse predecessor Oswald the Lucky Rabbit), but Mickey, while screwing around near said new world, somehow (not really explained, it just happens) unleashed an evil named the Blot, and spilled thinner all over the new world, destroying most of it. He goes into the world and tries to save it from the evil that he’s unleashed. The premise is actually not bad at all. I just found that I never cared for any of the characters, and the plot moves along slowly and nothing interesting ever really happens. I haven’t finished the game so maybe it got better after the 5-6 hours I’ve played, but what I’ve seen wasn’t really that interesting. Some people might like it, but to me, when you actually get to the action, the plot just doesn’t become that interesting, and doesn’t do justice to the premise.

Downsides

Cartoons
That’s easily my biggest disappointment in the game. When you start playing and get to a side-scrolling segment, you find film reels. I picked up those film reels and thought “whoa, that’s awesome, I’m gonna be able to watch the cartoons, that’s awesome!”… But then I find out that the film reels are just random collectibles that have to be given to an NPC, and only 2 of the film reels actually unlock a cartoon. You get Mickey Mouse’s “The Mad Doctor”, and Oswald’s “Oh What a Knight”. Both of those are really entertaining but… you find film reels for so many awesome Disney cartoons, why not let us watch them as well? Seems like such wasted potential, it would have easily made the game a must-buy if they had all those cartoons unlockable. I’m actually really hoping that this comes to the PS3, since having the game on a blu-ray would enable to have enough space for all of the cartoons… But maybe that’s just wishful thinking.

Side-scrolling segments
Those aren’t really good. The platforming itself isn’t as precise as the platforming in the 3D parts, and there’s no challenge to it whatsoever. It just feels completely pointless, other than finding the Film Reels. Really nothing more to say here…

Painting doesn’t amount to much
When you go through an area and, say, paint everything you can, all of that goes away when you come back…. Why? It makes the whole paint/thinner mechanic, which do affect a few things plot-wise and such, feel really pointless. Just a minor complaint, but it’s sort of stupid, especially when the developers talked about how important paint and thinner is…

Battle
The fighting is kinda lame… Scratch that, it’s really not interesting. You can shoot thinner to destroy enemies, or paint to make them nice (and they help you in battle which is interesting). You also have a spin attack, which pushes back enemies, so you can also push them back into pools of thinner (the spin attack doesn’t kill, other than some specific enemies… and it’s highly unresponsive). A few enemies are a bit different as they have to be thinner’d and then spin attacked, but those encounters aren’t very common. Every battle feels really pointless, as none of them are fun really. There’s no downside to dying, so I never found myself caring about the battles. The exploration and platforming is a lot more interesting than the fighting, and the game should have concentrated a little bit more on that…. and the following point.

Camera
Wow, the camera is BAD. I saw it mentioned in previews and reviews, but usually I can get used to the camera fairly easily (as I’ve gotten used to really terrible cameras in the N64 days), but here it’s really as bad as the reviews have been saying. You have 2 ways to manually control it: one button can put the camera behind Mickey, and the D-pad can rotate it around Mickey. Putting it behind Mickey sometimes brings it in really weird angles making it hard to see anything. The D-pad moves the camera INCREDIBLY slowly, it’s just annoying. When the camera is close to a wall, it starts screwing up, and it becomes hard to see anything when you get in an enclosed area. The camera will sometimes just have no idea what to do when you try to move it so it just won’t, and then there’s some parts where you want to move the camera, but the game purposely locks the camera controls with no indication that it has done so. It’s baffling how camera controls can still be so bad after 14 years of 3D gaming on consoles. While the platforming is fairly good, the crappy camera WILL get in your way and cause you to miss jumps.

Shooting paint is hardly accurate
Now that’s just lame. You’d think that you just point at what you want to paint/thin and press the button and it’s gonna work if you’re close enough, but no, it doesn’t. The paint will actually go sort of towards the direction you’re pointing, but it’s orientation will depend on your current camera angle and that’s really bad when the camera works as terribly as it does here. Sometimes making painting something that’s right in front of you nearly impossible, require weird jumps and aiming away from it to hit it. The paint goes in a sort of arc, so missing your target happens very often. I mean, it should have been simple to do: you point at something and shoot at it, why does it have to be so complicated?

Overall

I can’t judge everything in the game since I haven’t finished it, but I didn’t feel like finishing it. What I played didn’t really make me feel like the game deserved the “Epic” name, and it’s really not as fun as the developers made it sound in interviews. They talked about how using paint or thinner affected the environment and story, but very little of that is easy to see especially since things you paint don’t stay painted when you come back to that area.

The 3D platforming and exploration was fun, and I just simply loved the awesome visual design, but otherwise the game really falls flat. Some polishing, better combat, much better camera, better side-scrolling segments would have made it a fairly competent game at the very least. Heck, making all the cartoons unlockable instead of only 2 would have made it worth buying without having to change the game at all.

Big Disney fans will definitely find something to love here, the game will poke at your nostlagia nerves, but otherwise the game isn’t well made enough to warrant a purchase. I’ll call this a missed opportunity to make something truly great.

Pros and Cons

Pros
- Great visual design
- 3D platforming/exploration gameplay is quite fun
- Story premise is really interesting

Cons
- The side-scrolling segments suck
- The fighting is boring
- The camera is terrible
- Only 2 viewable cartoons
- Shooting paint or thinner lacks any kind of accuracy
- I haven’t mentioned that in the review, but it’s very easy to miss quests, and, when you do, even back-tracking won’t let you do them

The Save Factor

The starting price of the game is 50$, and I don’t think it’s worth it. If it had a lot more cartoons, I’d definitely say it would be worth the price, but here there’s only 2 cartoons and the actual game isn’t really that good. It’s rental worthy, but not much more. So that’s what I’ll say for the Save Factor here: rent it to see if you personally like the gameplay, and then decide how much you’d be willing to pay for it. Yeah, it kinda sucks that I can’t give a value as I usually do, but I can’t really. It’s just not something I could find myself spending any amount of money to own.

jobocan Console, Games, Review, wii