Mickey Mouse is back as a video game hero! (Disney Illusion Island in review)

 Well, friends, it's that time again! The time that Disney has decided to put more effort into their video game offerings, and specifically one based around making Mickey Mouse into a hero. Of course, there were the classic Sega Genesis games with Castle of Illusion and Power of Illusion, then there were the Disney's Magical Quest games for Game Boy Advance, and then Epic Mickey back on the Wii, and while Disney has made many games since then, very few have seen the Mouse take the spotlight for himself. He was a playable character in Disney Infinity, at first in Sorcerer form, and later just as himself.  We're now back to a Mickey (and friends) centric game in Disney's Illusion Island! I have been super interested in this one since it was first shown off sometime in the last year or so as part of a Nintendo Direct I think? Either way, I picked up on it because for one thing, you play as Mickey and friends through a 2D platformer, and for another thing, it looked just like Rayman Legends, which was a fantastic game that I wish they would make another sequel of! Was this game all that I thought it would be? Was this island of illusion the paradise that I was hoping for? Or was I just shipwrecked for a long time? That's what I hope to explain today, get your picnic baskets ready, folks, because we're headed to the island of Monoth!

The Adventure Begins!

    Disney's Illusion Island begins with Mickey, Minnie, Donald, and Goofy all recieving maps from each other, inviting the four of them to a picnic. Once they get to the picnic site, however, they realize that none of them wrote these maps out, and that it was actually a little creature who lured them there to locate the three stolen mystical books. He and all of his fellow villagers are big fans of the cartoons that Mickey and his friends have been doing for all these years, and assume that they can do all of the amazing feats that they do in the cartoons in order to save their island. The four friends decide to help them out with the task (though Donald is extremely hesitant), and the adventure begins. That's really all the story that I will tell you about, but I have to say that there are lots of twists and turns in this game that I didn't see coming. I didn't expect it to have a bad story, but I didn't think it would be super complicated or anything, and there were quite a few twists to the proceedings, which I was pleasantly surprised by. 

    The best way that I can describe the gameplay on display here is a 2D Metroidvania game where there's no combat. It sounds weird, but it was kind of refreshing to have a game where your movements have to constantly be planned out to avoid enemies instead of jumping onto them, because you just can't hurt any of them. The "Metroidvania" elements all come into effect with the different traversal actions. Right away, there's a cliff that you can't get across, and so you have to find something that will help you get across. You have to go to an inventive alligator-looking guy named Mazzy, and he finds a way to help everyone get across, with each character receiving different power-ups that allow them all to double jump. Mickey gets a jetpack, Minnie gets a giant paper airplane, Goofy gets a hot pepper that boosts him up, and Donald gets a rocket. The powers all work exactly the same, no matter who you use, but the animations for them are all really what you're going for. The game has 8 different powers that you'll receive as you go through, but I won't spoil them all here. All of the platforming is really well done, and you're really going to get used to all of the powers to avoid enemy attacks through traversal that definitely starts off pretty easy, but ramps up to pretty challenging gauntlets by the end. It's not the hardest game in the world, but there is some challenge at least. The boss fights are especially interesting, since the game doesn't have any sort of attack button, it's all about your platforming, and they were much more fun than I thought they really could be.

    So far, I've mainly been talking about single player, but Co-Op is really the way that this game is meant to be played. You can have up to 4 players playing at once, each being one of the four cartoon heroes with their own unique animations (which I'll get into in a bit). There's a nice move that definitely helps with survival, and that's to utilize the hug button. On top of being a really cute animation of two of the characters hugging, it allows you to get an extra heart which lets you take another hit, which can be recharged at any time just by giving another hug! Of course, if you die, there's not much penalty since you just respawn at the most recent mailbox, which you come across pretty frequently. On top of the hug move, there are a few other helpful moves with co-op. You can drop a rope down, helping some other players to move forward if they're having a hard time getting to a higher platform, leapfrog off of another player to get a boost of some sort, though my brother and I never really got that one to work to the extent that I feel the game wanted us to, and a few others that are unlocked as you get farther into the game.

A Well-Animated Time!

    The experience of playing this game is similar to watching some of the new Mickey Mouse cartoons in the "Wonderful World of Mickey Mouse" series, as the game follows that animation style for its duration. The opening segment led me to believe that the game could be fully voiced, and while it's not, there's enough charm in here for a whole cartoon by itself! There are only a few voiced scenes, but the animation even in the character's normal movements is so well done. As I said before, all of the characters have the same abilities, but they get different items to allow them to use them. All of these animations for the abilities are great, and especially Donald's made me laugh a lot. There's a running gag in this game that Mazzy always gives Donald his item last, even though he's standing third in line after Mickey and Minnie, and his items are typically made up of whatever he had lying around in his shed. This leads me to another point in this game's favor, the humor factor. This game had me laughing pretty consistently, whether it was Goofy making some silly meta joke about the nature that they're in a video game, or even just poking fun at the simplicity of the plot, the writing for all four of the main characters were great. Donald is just as grumpy as he always is, though my one complaint is that Goofy was kind of stuck on "talking about food" mode a bit too much for my liking, but it was all in good fun, and did seem like something that Goofy would potentially say. the charm doesn't just end at the animations or humorous writings, but there are tons of Disney references in here as well! 

    Throughout the island of Monoth, there are different collectibles for you to unlock, and my favorites are definitely the memorabilia, which commemorates different Mickey Mouse cartoons, some of which go way back to the beginning! There are three pieces to each cartoon, and they range from the Sorcerer costume that Mickey wore in "Sorcerer's Apprentice" to the Potato costumes that Donald and Mickey wore when trying to make "Potatoland" into a reality for Goofy. There are just tons and tons of references in here for big Disney fans like myself! In addition to those, you also get a quest from a reporter who wants you to take pictures of the mysterious Hidden Mickeys that are scattered around the island! They're a fun extra collectible, especially considering each of them shows the picture that the four characters take, and Donald is just not having it for the most part, constantly scowling or just refusing to look at the camera. They're fun little secrets and my brother and I laughed about it almost every time.

Not a perfect time, but definitely fun!

    Now I have to come to the part where I acknowledge the game's shortcomings, but really, there aren't all that many to speak of. The gameplay is pretty fun across the board, especially in co-op. The main issue that I had was just how long it took to get any type of Fast Travel ability. As you go through the game, there are only two or three places where you can use a teleporter, and conveniently, those are typically waiting for you at the end of quests that require you to go all the way across the map of the game (which is often quite a trek), but other than those two or three times, you're expected to just run everywhere until almost the very end of the game when you get the ability to teleport to any mailbox that you've found (which act as the game's "checkpoints"). This is a super convenient power and while I do appreciate the fact that it's here to help with completion, I was kind of wishing that you could have gotten it a bit sooner so you wouldn't have to go all the way back as many times as you already had at that point. Still, this really just amounted to a minor inconvenience, and the platforming was pretty good the whole way through, so I didn't mind it too much having to do it all again. I will say that even though the game was pretty short, maybe only 10 hours or so, it somewhat wore out its welcome by the end, but that may just be because towards the end, I was just expecting to get to the end, and then it continued on for another good little while. Honestly these are just little nitpicks that didn't really affect the overall experience that the game gives, and I didn't try for the hard mode which is unlocked afterwards, but I would imagine that it could make things a bit more frustrating. I'm pretty sure that you only get one life, and if you lose it, you have to restart from the beginning. That's just not really my cup of tea, but I was happy with the overall experience and would be happy for another play through sometime, but just on normal difficulty.

    Disney's games have been consistently pretty good recently, and this is no exception to that! Even better than most, there are no microtransactions here at all, which is a refreshing change to see just how different the model was for Disney Speedstorm. Of course, this is a completely different type of game that wouldn't lend itself to that as much, but as an indie platformer from Dlala Studios, it did a great job of being an entertaining 2D platformer, even without the emphasis on combat that many games have! Honestly I think the comparison to Rayman Legends hurt the game a bit for me personally, it doesn't hit the incredible heights of that game, but it does do a great job of making an entirely platforming-focused Metroidvania, which is a feat in its own right! Add in the cup of Disney magic that's included, and this is genuinely a very fun time.

    Thanks so much for reading my review of Disney Illusion Island, friends! I hope you'll give this game a try with some friends some time! It's not a perfect product, but it is pretty fun, especially if you like 2D platformers or Disney cartoons! If you've tried it out already, I definitely would love to hear your thoughts on it somewhere on the internet. Thanks again for all your support and I hope you're having a great week! Until next time, I'm Jonathan, a Self-Proclaimed Disney games fan, and I'll talk to you again soon!