Epic is a word that I’m starting to dislike. I think it’s thrown around too much these days and it’s really losing its effect. When I heard the title “Epic Mickey” my reaction was… meh. That being said, I went into playing Epic Mickey very neutral. Wasn’t really looking to forward to playing it, but at the same time didn’t mind taking the time to check it out. First thing I noticed about Epic Mickey was how dark it was. When I say dark I don’t mean creepy and disturbing; I mean having to turn the brightness up on the TV dark. This bothered me because I REALLY don’t like changing my settings and this is the first game I have ever had to do that too. Most of the environments are dark (as in creepy this time) and run down, but that is because the world you are playing in is called the Wasteland.
The Wasteland is a place where all of the old forgotten characters of Disney go. As you proceed through your journey you will run into many characters from old (and I mean Steam Boat Willy old) Disney animations. At one point the Wasteland wasn’t a bad place; but due to a paint thinner accident (that Mickey causes by the way), the land becomes a wasteland. Before it became the Wasteland, the land was made to look like Disneyland. It was colorful, happy, and an overall nice place to be. Now it looks like something out of a child’s nightmare. Buildings are broken down, rides don’t work, and the overall vibe is just pretty creepy.
Before I continue too far I really need to talk about Paint and Thinner because they are the major elements that will shape your game play. Paint is the side of light; it breeds creation, repairs things, turns enemies into friends, and overall makes people happy. Thinner is the dark side to paint’s light side. Thinner is the more powerful tool, but the only thing it represents is destruction. You can break down walls, destroy enemies, and even turn friends into puddles.
Paint and thinner aren’t just tools to create and destroy; they truly affect the way your game is played and how other characters react to you. When a character gives you a quest to do, depending on how you complete it using paint or thinner will determine what kind of items that character gives you as well as if he may help you later or not. How you treat the world around you also has the same effect. Some characters will help you because you help to rebuild, while other characters will help you because you destroy. Using paint is usually the more difficult way to complete quests, but the rewards are usually much better. Using thinner definitely has its advantages as well in certain situations. Thin out certain walls, ceilings, or floors and you will find secret areas that contain great items.
The game is completely quest based. Some quest will lead you through the game, while others are optional. I found many of the optional quests to have great value later on in the game. I helped Small Pete close to the beginning of the game and that lead to me not having to fight a horde of enemies as well as various other characters throughout the game helping me instead of being my enemy. There are usually at least two ways to complete a quest. One would be by using paint, which I mentioned earlier is the harder way; the other is to destroy and use thinner.
Many of your quests you need to get from Gremlins that you find and free from cages around the map. These aren’t your “don’t put water on them” kind of Gremlins; they are more of the help fix stuff type Gremlins. Many of the Gremlin quests are completely optional and take a little work to get to, but just because you don’t feel like taking the extra steps to free a Gremlin doesn’t mean you shouldn’t. Some Gremlins don’t give quests at all; they actually help you in your quest. I went through several quests where the difficulty was cut by more than half because I freed some extra Gremlins.
You have quite a range of enemies in this game. You can separate them into two groups; The Blot and Beetleworx. The Blot came to be as a result of the thinner accident caused by Mickey and are pretty much big gobs of black paint that attack you when they see you. Blots come in all shapes, sizes, and with different abilities. You can either use thinner to destroy them or paint and turn them into friends. When they are your friends they will attack enemies for you. This is both good and bad; reason being that every time they hit an enemy they lose paint. If they lose enough paint they will turn into enemy again. So, if you have two or three friendly Blots and come across let’s say five or six enemy Blots, there is a chance that your friends will turn against you if you’re not careful and you will now have 8-9 Blots to fight. Gives you something to think about because if you get more friendlies then you can manage it can backfire on you quickly.
The Beetleworx are a bit simpler to deal with in the aspect as you have no chance of making them your friend. Paint does not work on them; actually, they kind of use it against you. They usually paint some type of shield around themselves in the form of a familiar Disney character. You need to use thinner to remove that shield before attacking them. The strategy behind them is simple, but they are usually more aggressive and pack a bigger punch than your average Blot.
One thing that surprised me about the game is how regularly you are asked to make moral decisions. Disney usually likes to keep their profile pretty clean; especially when it comes to Mickey. Every Mickey game that comes to mind is usually a linear path where everything you do is in the path of good. In this game, you will have many times where you will be able to decide to help yourself or help someone else, build or destroy, sacrifice or gain. Also, just because you rescue or help another character doesn’t always mean that you will get something in return; so don’t just expect to get your prize later. As mentioned earlier, the decisions you make weigh heavily on later game play. Are you going to save that Gremlin or take those E-Tickets instead? There is a good chance that the Gremlin you save (or not) will help you in a major way later… or maybe it will just say thanks and leave.
There are quite a few areas where I thought they dropped the ball on this one. The first and the most obvious is the camera. When movable, the camera was sluggish at best. Most of the time however, you get locked into horrible camera angles. The camera angles were my #1 cause of death in this game. Another thing that really bothered me was the fact that the world wasn’t persistent. No matter how much you colored an area, when you left and came back it was back to the way you first found it. This gave me no incentive to fix up areas as I found them unless it was directly involved with a mission. You will come across a few devices that when you paint them activate certain things. Even these were returned back to their original state after I left an area or died. It became quite the pain to go back to these areas to get things working again.
Another thing with the painting; even if you colored an entire area as much as you could, most of the time it still would like twisted and run down. I figure if you are giving me the power to “change the way the world looks”, why don’t you actually let me change the way the world looks. Probably my biggest pet peeve was the aiming. I found that when aiming distances or downward you would wind up either wasting paint or thinner on the floor. This isn’t too much of a problem with paint, but with thinner it can become a major problem. I mentioned earlier that there are sometimes secret passages under the floor. Thinning the floor by accident during a fight can drop you into these secret enclosed areas with enemies. Sometimes there are puddles of thinner underneath the floor that you end up falling into as well. It just became very annoying over time and really killed the fun I was having.
I honestly cannot recommend buying this game. It would probably do better as a rental, but I really can’t justify spending $50 on it. The story is slightly intriguing and it is interesting how they present you with so many moral decisions that affect game play so deeply over and over again, but for the most part I can’t really say it was really fun to play. This is mostly because of the bad camera angles that make the game frustrating to play. I’m really glad I didn’t go in with high expectations because I probably would have been pissed. Epic Mickey just isn’t all that epic.
