Epic Mickey: Review

Epic Mickey, a game developed by Junction Point Studios, was released this past fall for the Wii. Mickey is placed in a shambles of a world and given the choice to restore, or further destroy it with the aid of a magic paintbrush. Is this Disney game a masterpiece, or is it worse than your third grade artwork? Let’s take a look…

"The ears look a bit off..."

Story

The story is such: Mickey, after messing with a model of what looks like a theme park (some sort of land, full of Disney things…) releases  an evil ink blot (go with it) that takes over the model. Some time later (Years maybe? Eh, I didn’t really care at this point) the ink monster finds Mickey, and drags him into the model (Wait, why was it never moved? No one noticed anything…odd about it?)

He's kind of a jerk when you think about it, leaving this mess behind.

So Mickey enters the model, which has become a broken down theme park for all intents and purposes, and sets out to fix things in this world, which has plenty of old Disney characters that older fans may recognize (and I knew a few ’cause of that “House of Mouse” show on a few years ago.) Now in traveling, there are some areas where you will be presented with two options.  I found this impressive since you don’t seem able to go back and choose to play the second option, which I do honestly like; the fact that your decisions are permanent.

Visuals and Sound

Okay, visuals are my first problem with this game.  It’s usually dark, which makes sense since the world is in ruins, but good god I had to really try and focus at some parts just to see where to go.  It ended up hurting my eyes so bad I had to stop playing at points. And so we’re clear, I wasn’t playing in a pitch black room or anything, at one point I literally had every light on in my room and for the love of Walt I still couldn’t see.

I have to admit though, the cutscenes are enjoyable

As for sound, there was honestly very little music and it wasn’t anything really exciting. I found this really disappointing, you’d think a Disney game would have a great musical score, but often times I found myself with nothing but some background noises (steam, woo hoo.) So yea, those were both pretty disappointing.

Gameplay

Now I know that the use of motion controls catches a lot of flak lately (and yes, Wiimote and Nunchuck are all you can use) well…this isn’t the game to clear up that stereotype. Often, I had trouble aiming at enemies and was attacked often because of this. Your camera seems to be playing for the other side, as it often takes an angle that can easily kill you when you have to jump to a platform, or get lost while you’re moving around a building. Now this doesn’t happen all the time, but enough that I took notice. So while it may not ruin the whole game for you, it will take you out of the experience.

Probably the time I was least annoyed with moving around was on these levels.

Overall

So this game really does disappoint me, I had high hopes for this one, it had an interesting premise and sounded like a revival of the good ol’ Disney games (Duck tales, Aladdin) and this let me down. I really felt bad because this was a Christmas gift and my mom really seemed to feel bad that I didn’t enjoy playing. So I have to say, if you really wanna play this game and see it for yourself, rent it. Otherwise, skip over this one.

Now this Mickey could have had an interesting story to it