Tiny Diggers – An iPad Construction Truck Game for Kids Age 2-5

There are some games that you get hyped up to review, and live up to every expectation that you had for the game.  Those are games you love to review.  Then you have others that you get hyped for, but when you finally sit down to play them, you just try to figure out what the hell went wrong.  Epic Mickey unfortunately falls into that category.  It is a beautiful game that brings about great concepts and steeped in Disney lore, but never executes any of these ideas with success.  Instead, Epic Mickey gets lost in its own expectations, poor camera, and tedious game mechanics.

Epic Mickey starts out with a bang, as it harkens back to the old animated classic, Fantasia.  We watch Mickey sneak into the wizard’s laboratory, and take a look at his new creation – an amusement park for creations that have been forgotten by the world.  But nothing is ever that simple, and on accident, Mickey spills vials of paint and paint thinner, which transforms the world into a warped version of the real world.  Mickey wants to walk away from the world that he has devastated, but he feels compelled to make things right, so he jumps into the map with the intent of fixing the world.

Waking up in the world of Wasteland, the skewed world that Mickey created is a sight to behold.  It is a beautiful world, and looks spectacular, with the caveat of saying that it is on the Wii.  Sure, I hate having to qualify my statement, but while the game is stunning on the Wii, it pains me to think about how this game really deserved to be seen in 1080p resolution.  But it does look fantastic, with Mickey, the Gremlins, and so much more popping out left and right from the historic vaults.  The illusion falls apart when you start heading into areas and you notice that all the abundant NPC characters look exactly the same.  When you walk on to Mean/Main Street, you realize that everyone there looks absolutely identical.  This pattern continues as you work through the world, and it really breaks the immersion.  There are so many different characters from the rich Disney world, so why use the same character models over and over.  It just seems like so much was poured into the world environments, which are phenomenal, that the characters seemed to be lost in the shuffle.

As you play through the story, you start to learn that all is not right with Wasteland.  All the characters seem to be upset that the rest of the world has past them by, including Mickey Mouse.  But the story does get a little deeper with the inclusion of Oswald, The Lucky Rabbit.  Mickey finds out that Oswald has created this world, attempting to craft it in the likeness of Disneyland, but with Oswald being the focus.  Mickey not only finds out that he has a brother of sorts, but that he resents everything that Mickey has become, feeling that he was deserving of that success.  The story does seem to have some deep meaning, but it never really works its way to the surface in an obvious manner.  Some things will never make any sense until you finish the game and you realize, oh, that’s what that means.  It just seems to trip on its haste to show you the next cool world or nostalgic ride that you may have forgotten from your past.

Gameplay is simple enough with shaking the remote allowing you to spin attack characters and items in the world, while you use the Z button for spraying paint and the trigger button on the Wiimote to spray thinner.  With paint and thinner, you can make objects appear, or disappear in Wasteland.  It sounds like a rather neat mechanic, and it was described in such a way at press briefings, that it would be a use-anywhere power, but that is just not the case.  The paint and thinner mechanism is very arbitrary.  Only certain items and sections can be affected by either item, and in some cases, some items that are affected by paint or thinner in one sequence will not be affected by it in the next.  There are supposed to be consequences for using Paint and Thinner on enemies.  Use thinner a lot and you will look evil in the eyes of the creations of Wasteland, while using Paint will make people appreciate you more.  It sounds promising, but it never really affects you in any way in regards to story progression.  I mean, it seems like the decisions you make in this title are the complete antithesis of what a Warren Spector games should be about.  Those games are about making meaningful decisions that have weight and consequences with them.  Here, it never seems to matter.

While I can put up with a lot of things like generic gameplay, and average storytelling, I cannot abide by a camera system that fights you every step of the way while you play the game.  The camera is probably one of the worst in gaming history.  It constantly finds the worst angle, and the camera controls are so hit and miss.  Sometimes they work, and sometimes, you cannot use them.  Many times, I found myself in the position of needing to use paint and/or thinner on an object, but I would have to take several minutes navigating the environment to get the camera into a position that was usable for the task at hand.  After a couple of hours, I downright hated the camera and it became a deterrent to me wanting to play the game.  I could sit here and write out a list of every time the camera put me in a compromised position, or had me guessing my jump angles because I could not rotate it.  Too many deaths became the result of a broken camera system, and left me just irritated by the game.

Sadly, even the one item that the game does so well is also inflicted with flaws.  At level transition points, you have to go through connection portals, each of which plays out in a 2D side scrolling platform type game.  These sections are highly colorful and really play off the era of the cartoons that they are based on.  They look beautiful and are a lot of fun to travel through at first.  But several of these sections will have to be tracked and re-tracked several times over, slowly becoming more tedious with each traversal.  I was sad at this fact as I really enjoyed these sections, but continuous backtracking just killed the enjoyment.

It is unfortunate that Epic Mickey is saddled with all of these problems.  I never thought it would be a game of the year chaser, but I never felt that it would be such a hodge-podge of problems.  There are so many nuggets of good sitting in Epic Mickey, but you have to fight for each enjoyable morsel, and the fat in-between is just gristle with a lack of any kind of fun.  The art style and platforming sections are good, and the history here is pretty amazing, but the gameplay and atrocious camera should be enough to keep all but the absolute devoted away from this title.  Epic Mickey gets 2 out of 5 Aeropausonauts.

Check out Epic Mickey and other Nintendo Wii reviews at Test Freaks.