(Vita) Epic Mickey 2: The Power of Two review

One of the biggest missed opportunities I’ve come across in gaming, a charming nostalgic platformer that’s an absolute chore to play and made worse still by a sloppy port to Vita, despite a few elements that shine through the drudgery.

Developer	Blitz Games; Junction Point Studios
Publisher	Disney Interactive Entertainment; Sony Computer Entertainment
Franchise	Disney/Pixar
Genre	3D Platformer
PSTV	No
Physical English	Yes – EU/NA

 

World-building & Story

Once again pulled into the world of forgotten toons known as Wasteland, Mickey and his magic paintbrush must help rebuild the ruins after a series of earthquakes bring this quirky location to its knees.

Absolutely the most compelling thing about Epic Mickey, which is repeated in this sequel, is Wasteland itself and its inhabitants consisting of characters contained in Disney’s early works that were basically never seen again. Annabelle, Gus, The Mad Doctor, Pete, Ortensia and Smee are just some of the many creatures you’ll come across and although I only knew a handful of them (mostly from Mickey’s Wild Adventure, although I recognised some from things like Peter Pan), it’s lovely to see them get a new lease of life here.

The star of the show is Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, Mickey’s precursor whose rights were lost for half a century and his cheerful banter with Mickey hides his feelings of abandonment underneath. I understand this was heavily addressed in the first game but is more skimmed over here – The Power of Two assumes you have a working knowledge of the first game, which is baffling given that this is a multi-platform sequel with no recap before you start playing.

The feeling that you need prior knowledge permeates throughout Epic Mickey 2, whether it be understanding that The Mad Doctor was the endgame antagonist of the last one or just basic understanding of who all these numerous toons actually are. The game throws you in at the deep end and asks you to work it out, often flying through major events at a pace that meant I failed to properly grasp them which was a real shame.

The actual plot itself is a sort of entertaining kid’s adventure where you’ll travel around various areas in wasteland trying to fix the damage caused, while also finding missing Gremlins and dealing with oddball requests made by the various animatronic residents. It’s anchored by the Mad Doctor, who now bursts into song every time you see him (something I hated) and overall while there’s nothing offensive bad here, it’s very middle of the road and frankly a little boring (although it definitely peaks towards the end).

You can tell it’s coming from a development team have a great love for the source material and they’ve crafted a great world for it to exist in, which makes it a shame the actual experience is such a slog. It’s hampered by a heavy handed morality system too, that constantly judges you for gameplay choices you won’t truly understand until after you’ve done them (more on this later).

 

Presentation & Sound

Epic Mickey 2’s origins as a Wii game up-ported to PS360 and then down-ported to Vita mean it’s a bit of a visual mixed bag albeit one that does look pretty interesting from time to time, but none of this really matters given the huge elephant in the room – the absolutely abysmal performance.

Wasteland itself is comprised of a variety of different areas, from the floating city of Mean Streets with crumbled buildings and broken fountains scattered around to outdoor wooded areas littered with old Disney relics of things like Alice in Wonderland. There’s quite a few occasions where it does look beautiful, highlighted by a few zones like Blot Alley with its neon lanterns or the Dioramas where you run through a variety of metal structures based on recreated scenes from Disney history.

What’s most impressive is that vast amounts of this world can be painted or thinned based on the earthquake damage to them, but this is inconsistent making it feel more like a gimmick than the world being built around this. There are also 2D sections that run the gambit from generic circuses with interactive toys you can trigger, to more appropriate black and white levels based on themes like Steamboat Willy which I enjoyed. Like so much in Epic Mickey, it’s just wildly inconsistent.

Character modelling is decent for the most part with Mickey and Oswald having a quirky charm to their design, plus you can customise their outfits. Plenty of the NPC’s look brilliant too and just like their cartoon counterparts (I loved the walking brooms from Fantasia early on), although I was a little disappointed in enemy design. Most things you’ll encounter are just generic robots and it’s difficult to make out what they’re supposed to be on the Vita’s screen. Even bosses are mostly just mechanical monstrosities that didn’t really feel Mickey inspired.

None of this really matters though because Epic Mickey 2 suffers from an absolutely shocking framerate on Vita that makes it borderline unplayable. I’m someone who tolerated the Jak Trilogy on Vita despite the issues and this is significantly worse than that (I went back and briefly played Jak & Daxter after finishing Epic Mickey to check it wasn’t just my memory, but they really are lightyears apart). Mickey moves at what feels like a snail’s pace almost constantly, which makes combat and platforming actively difficult and also makes everything take longer than it needs to – then the game will taunt you with a section where things improve only to take a dive again.

This is especially egregious since the developers promised to fix this on Vita and had six months from the console release to do so, but completely failed. At least voice acting is wonderful all round (even if the singing gets a bit annoying, the quirky British accents are hilarious) and the soundtrack from Pushing Daisies veteran Jim Dooley is top tier as expected.

Soundtrack highlight – Yen Sid’s Lab

 

Gameplay & Content

It’s hard to put my finger on just what exactly went wrong with Epic Mickey 2 but a variety of issues combine to make this one of the biggest missed opportunities I’ve ever seen. I love 3D platformers, but this one was an absolute chore to play despite a few glimmers of brilliance.

You control Mickey in what is effectively a co op adventure, with Oswald constantly by your side. You can play in ad hoc, but for solo players the computer controls Oswald – which is some of the worst AI I’ve ever encountered in a game. He constantly gets in the way, never helps during combat and while he’s needed for some context-sensitive actions, he’s pretty much never there when you need him to be and takes absolute babysitting to do the most basic of actions.

See, Oswald has a remote that is used to do things like hack doors or trigger switches and you’ll need to do simple things like open gates to allow him to access these. Mickey has his own weapon which is a magic paintbrush, allowing him to fill in parts of the world that have lost their colour or remove them from existing items as he sees fit and this mechanic feeds into every aspect of the game with incredibly mixed results.

You’ll often run around looking for what can be painted and what can be thinned to progress which can be infuriating, especially as the game monitors your usage of both to assign your morality. Signposting and just general visual design is often lacking and levels can be dark which makes it difficult to see where you can go, made worse by a camera that rarely keeps up with the action and has to be manually fixed nearly all of the time.

Combat sounds good on paper as you have spin attacks and can thin or paint your enemies, the latter of which will make them friendly to you. In practice it’s awful as you struggle to aim through the framerate (despite the inclusion of touch controls for this) only to find out that most foes need you to thin their outer shells before you can even damage them. Bigger bad guys also take far too long to dispatch, especially when Oswald is being no help at all.

It culminated in a segment where I was painting little bad guys to help me with the boss coming later, only for them to get in the way of my paint streams against him so I kept dying. I tried again by thinning them instead which was easier, but then the game punished me for choosing the bad moral choice. Epic Mickey 2 is filled with nonsense like this. Boss battles are marginally better at least with some creative objectives, but are let down by the shoddy camera.

At its core though, this is a 3D platformer and it does get things slightly more right in this aspect, albeit there are still tonnes of issues. There’s a lot of collectibles here used for various purposes and plenty of sections requiring decent movement skills. The problem is that the framerate just makes it so difficult to time the double jump and when you land, surfaces feel slippery meaning I often fell to my death unexpectedly.

This is combined with some poor visual design meaning it’s not always obvious where you can go, alongside Oswald’s braindead AI which makes the sections where you have to use his hover ability even more challenging than they need to be. There’s also some 2D sections between zones and these tended to be a bit better and more responsive, albeit they weren’t particularly challenging but at least did well to mix in some variety.

You’ll gather things like cloth, e-tickets, mouse ears and these can be traded in the hubs for costumes, health upgrades and pins which act as nice memorabilia for dedicated fans. You also free gremlins and pigs (although the latter sing in annoying rhymes when you do), meaning there’s plenty of tasks to undertake, but it’s centred around a questing system from the hub world that feels oddly out of place in a 3D platformer like this.

Epic Mickey 2 is structured bizarrely early on, where you’re sent through endless projectors to the next area before you reach the Mean Streets hub and things start to make a little more sense. Levels are effectively big open areas and there’s usually two to three routes through, one being a morally good choice, one bad and the third is usually neither (if there is a third route). You’re monitored throughout the adventure with these and your choices will dictate whether you get paint or thinner upgrades.

In reality, it’s very easy to make the wrong choice (as in my example earlier on) with useless prompting from Gus rarely helping me figure out what was going on. There’s also photography features (with gyro aiming which works well), sketches which you drop into the world using touchscreen (poorly explained but works well once you understand it) and two types of ink that make you invisible or invincible. There’s no shortage of ideas here and the post game gives lots of reasons to come back.

It’s just such a messy experience to get to the ending after 10 hours. You might think after the slating I gave the game in my write up above I’d be giving it one of my lowest scores ever but I’m not – unlike other platformers such as Muppets Movie Adventures or SpongeBob HeroPants at least there’s ambition in Mickey, it just squanders basically all of its potential. Yet I did have fun at points and there’s the bones of a brilliant experience hidden somewhere underneath the mess.

 

Conclusion

The situation surrounding Epic Mickey 2 on Vita is bizarre, with it being a late port of a critically mauled platformer that actually manages to make the experience worse despite a few neat touch integrations. The forgotten Wasteland of Disney toons is absolutely its best feature and there are a few moments where you can see what is a great game it could be, but for the most part it’s a jumbled frustration of bad camera, bad AI and ridiculous morality choices.

4.5/10