Kinect Disneyland Adventures – Review
Platform | Release Date
360 | November 15, 2011
Developed by Frontier Developments
Published by Microsoft Game Studios
The Pitch:
Now bring the magic of Disneyland® to your living room. Leave the controller behind and play with your full body as you capture Disney moments with the whole family, meet over 35 characters, and explore 12 worlds. Experience new Disneyland® Adventures with you as the star.
With a game like Kinect Adventures being packed into every Kinect sold, it’s easy to take one look at Kinect Disneyland Adventures and immediately turn up your nose. Kinect Adventures was not good, containing a bunch of lame attempts trying to prove the technology ‘worked’. It wasn’t fun and had even my kids wanting to play something else within fifteen minutes. Despite the name similarities however, Kinect Disneyland Adventures is fairly far apart in quality. This is a good thing.
When it was announced, I honestly wanted nothing more than a virtual Disneyland. A place that replicated the ins and outs of going to one of the most magical places on Earth. Frontier Developments has thankfully delivered this to a degree. You’ll walk around the theme park visiting Tomorrowland and Frontierland, and get to “meet” some of the more famous Disney mascots. Mickey, Donald, and Minnie; Jessie, Buzz, and Woody all are hanging around for you to high five, dance a jig, or even get quests from. They’re the Disneyland equivalent of MMO quest givers, but you can hug them instead of ignore what they have to say.
This is where the ‘game’ comes into play and how you get to do more and more stuff around the park. The entire land park is replicated in the game and it allows you to just wander around looking at the sights, but even at Disney, you’re gonna need to do more stuff than just sightsee. Performing tasks for the mascots unlocks new items and abilities for your character. While some of the early stuff may get stale, it does a great job at introducing new toys to keep things somewhat fresh.
You’ll eventually get a blaster, magic wand, and camera to tool around with in the park as well as several other items, and each will help you earn more and more coins to buy souvenirs in the multitude of shops. Yes, just like the real park, consumerism is Disney’s main focus. My daughter latched onto that mechanic immediately, buying up whatever she could with her few coins, and eventually heading out to the park just so she could buy a new Cinderella costume. She’s gonna be a completionist, I’m sure of it.
Like with other Kinect titles, the biggest problems seem to stem from the Kinect hardware itself. Being aimed at kids, and trying quite hard to be accessible with voice commands and ‘easy’ actions, it seems that the device just isn’t sensitive enough. The primary way to interact with things is by waving at them, and even that was a frustrating experience for my 5-year-old daughter as it never really tracked her hand well. I’d also get to hear her say “Park Map” over and over with different inflection levels, just to perform that action. Thanks to an insane 3-year-old sister who likes to run in front of the camera combined with the drop-in/out co-op, we also got plenty of anger due to Kinect just not knowing what to do and pausing everything. Hey, PlayStation Move doesn’t do that.
When the technology is working however, it’s actually quite a cool game. There are plenty of attractions, rides, and characters to interact with. Some of the attractions, which are big multi-chapter mini-games based on popular park rides, even utilize a nice cell shaded art style and are generally neat. All the big names like Space Mountain, Haunted Mansion, and Pirates of the Caribbean are represented so there’s no shortage of fan service.
Even with the frustration she experiences, my daughter constantly asks to play. I was impressed at how the developers kept adding onto the gameplay so just when it began to get stale, something new would happen to quash that. Kinect Disneyland Adventures is certainly not a replacement for the real thing, but it’s a nice title that should grant you some fun family times.
Related Posts:
