Disney Epic Mickey 2: The Power of Two

Genre: 3D Platformer

Players: 1-2 Co-Op (Local)

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Review:

Disney Epic Mickey 2 is a 3D Platformer released in 2012 on PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and Wii U and ported to PlayStation Vita in 2013, and then to PC in 2014. This is the direct successor to 2010’s Disney Epic Mickey, with a plot that follows that game’s story, with Mickey once again being summoned to Wasteland to help Oswald and Ortensia face a new force threatening to destroy their home, and to help determine if the supposedly reformed Mad Doctor really has changed his ways.

Epic Mickey 2 features some large and detailed 3D environments with a nice cartoony look to them. Unfortunately, what little visual pizazz this game may have offered.is undone by some absolutely atrocious framerate issues. These problems were so bad that in places the game seemed nearly unbearable to play.

The sound fares better here, with the voice acting being quite good for most of the characters. The Mad Doctor is particularly amusing, with his insistence on always expressing himself in rhyming song. On the other hand, it can get annoying when one of these characters keeps repeating himself ad nauseum when you’re trying to figure out just what it is you’re supposed to be doing (looking at you, Gus).

The gameplay here starts out quite promising, with players introduced to a world they can potentially tear apart or build up using the alternate powers of paint and thinner from their magical paintbrush. Unfortunately, this soon proves to be misleading, and the rest of the game is a fairly standard, even somewhat mediocre 3D Platformer with a co-op dynamic.

Players can have a friend join in to play Oswald, but otherwise he joins you as an AI-controlled character. Both he and Mickey have a distinctly different set of abilities, and it would have been nice to have the option to swap to him… but that’s not something the game allows. As a result, unless you’re playing with a live human friend, all that co-op stuff becomes tedious frustration whenever you find something Oswald needs to do and must call him over to do his part. If you could simply do it yourself, that would be fine, and if the AI was smart enough to know without being told what it needs to do, that would be acceptable as well… but like this, it’s needlessly frustrating.

Before I wrap up this review, I should say that there is one other bonus included in this game that’s deserving a mention. As a bonus, players can play the classic animated Disney short Skeleton Dance in this game’s menus. It feels somewhat shoehorned in here, as the short does not feature Mickey, and it can’t be paused, rewound, or fast-forwarded, but its inclusion is nice all the same.

Overall, I feel like a lot of the ideas behind Epic Mickey have a lot of promise, but I find that promise soon gives way to a fairly unoriginal 3D Platformer with some nasty performance issues. This game isn’t outright unplayable, but it’s a terribly disappointing waste of potential.

tl;dr – Epic Mickey 2 is a 3D Platformer that has a lot of promise in its paint/thinner magical brush game mechanic… but soon abandons anything interesting that mechanic has to offer, instead focusing on its tedious, poorly-implemented forced co-op gameplay. As if that wasn’t enough, this game has some pretty terrible performance issues too. The only thing epic about this game is the epic disappointment.

Grade: C-

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