Disneyland Adventures (Xbox One)

Back in 1990, Disney tried to bring the magic of their premiere theme park to peoples’ homes with a game called Adventures in the Magic Kingdom, but they didn’t quite hit the mark. Part of it was no doubt due to technological limitations, but limited imagination certainly played a part in the weak end product as well. Many years later though, Disneyland would once again find itself a virtual theme park, this time with much more powerful hardware and a lot more love put into the end product. Disneyland Adventures, unsurprisingly, ends up a much more interesting theme park simulation, but a dash of video game magic has allowed its rides to turn into adventures.

 

Play begins as a kid receives a golden ticket to visit Disneyland, the ticket itself even coming to life to help guide the child through the Disney theme park. After Mickey Mouse himself teaches the player some basics of park navigation, everything is pretty much open for the child to interact with, a fairly accurate version of 2011’s version of Disneyland allowing the player to explore all the places that would cost a pretty penny to reach in real life. Certain changes have been made, such as many shops and restaurants being inaccessible, but there are some you can go in to buy merchandise for your character to wear, collectible pins, and commemorative photo albums you can fill by taking pictures throughout the park. There are no lines despite the presence of many other people wandering around, their only interference being occasionally blocking the camera during scripted interactions. Whether a player chooses to play with Kinect or controller, the theme park has been reproduced in wonderful detail and seems bound to please any kid who has dreamed of visiting the California attraction.

 

There are some unfortunate realities of a digital adaptation of a theme park though. In real life, climbing aboard the flying Dumbos or sitting in the spinning teacups has the dynamic movement to make things interesting. It’s an experience based around a sensation, so when you hop aboard these rides in Disneyland Adventures, the game doesn’t really seem to know what to do with them. You just end up viewing things through first person as the screen watches the ride move around for a while, and what’s worse, sometimes you’re not even alone on the ride. Sitting in the teacups, you might find your view dominated by the kid sitting across from you, and even aboard a kid-friendly coaster in Mickey’s Toontown you might end up sitting behind people and made to watch the back of their heads instead of being able to look around while on the ride. It is somewhat appreciated they included these rides at all, but there is much more imagination on show in how the rest of the park is adapted, especially the much larger and more famous attractions like Space Mountain and Pirates of the Caribbean.

The Attractions, appropriately enough, are the main attraction of Disneyland Adventures, these being segments of the game that take real life areas from the park and twist them into fanciful journeys that reflect the experiences they were meant to evoke. Stepping into the Haunted Mansion involves playing games with actual ghosts and supernatural phenomena, Peter Pan’s Flight is now about a kid actually taking flight with the boy who never grows up, and Buzz Lightyear’s Astro Blasters have them flying through outer space to fight aliens and the evil Emperor Zurg. Most attractions usually consist of a few chapters where the gameplay is different for each one. For example, the Finding Nemo Submarine Voyage begins with a game of underwater Hide and Seek, then turns into an action-packed escape from the hungry shark Bruce, and it culminates in riding on turtle back through the East Australian Current. The tasks are often simple to remain accessible for young players, and you’ll gradually see a few familiar game types crop up across different games. There are games about flying about the screen to collect coins while dodging trouble, different twists on throwing things at enemies, and games focused on following a rhythm or posing correctly. The posing games can be pretty boring with the controller since they were designed for Kinect and not really adapted much to fit a way of play that doesn’t involve moving your whole body, but most of the games keep things moving and action focused, taking damage or messing up just leading to you losing the money you’ve collected during the experience. Just like the park itself though, much of the design behind these minigames is giving you something wondrous to look at, and in some like the outer space areas of Space Mountain it can look absolutely marvelous. Others like The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh are more about capturing the simple joy of hanging out with such gentle characters, and the Princess Faire is just a chance for young children to dance with their favorite Disney princesses to their definitive songs. A lot of the simple controls and reused designs are easier to ignore when the style of the activity still makes it a lovely little experience.

 

Another nice touch to the game has to be the many cartoon characters populating the park. Rather than having mascot characters walk around, Disneyland Adventures has the real deal there to interact with the player character, each one happy to give high fives, pose for pictures, and sign autograph books. While some expected faces like Mickey Mouse and many of the Disney Princesses are obviously there, we then have quite a wide variety of individuals to meet. The Genie from Aladdin, Buzz Lightyear from Toy Story, Stitch from Lilo and Stitch, Baloo from Jungle Book… the game has many big names reproduced with fairly good voice stand-ins, but then there are even deeper reaches. Since Splash Mountain is featured, the player can interact with Song of the South characters like Br’er Rabbit and Br’er Fox, villains like The Queen of Hearts from Alice in Wonderland and Captain Hook from Peter Pan are there to talk to you, and even Stinky Pete from Toy Story 2 of all characters hangs around Big Thunder Mountain. Interactions with them are more for the sake of seeing how they’ll talk and react to your options like hugging them or dancing with them, and these have a few nice touches like a hint of music from their source films or more villainous characters trying to maintain their evil nature without being rude to a kid just looking for a hug. It manages to pretty accurately capture the childlike innocence of really thinking you’re hugging your favorite fictional character… but there is one downside to meeting these characters, and that’s that they have a LOT of stuff they want you to do.

If you play Disneyland Adventures for the rides and the visuals, you’ll have a pretty fun experience, but when you start talking to characters, they’ll start giving you quests, and there is an absurd amount of them on offer to fill game time with. Most of these are almost all a different spin on scouring the park for a character appropriate item, Snow White wanting you to find pie ingredients so she can feed the Seven Dwarves, Cinderella wanting thread for her dresses, Winnie the Pooh hoping you’ll find him honey, Duffy the Disney Bear miming a request for you to find teddy bears… nearly every character will have multiple requests for you to run off into the park to find these objects that are suddenly scattered around it. You can have the golden ticket guide you to one objective at a time to make finding them easier, but then you have plenty of extra subquests like taking all the photos of areas of interest in a portion of the park or using items you get like a magic wand or megaphone on every possible environmental object. On top of that, some characters will ask you to play the attractions and complete extra objectives during them, it actually being possible that a character’s sequence of requests will require you to play the attractions a few times over to complete every task they have for you.

 

To be brutally honest, almost all of these quests are just busywork. They involve wandering around the park and picking things up to bring them back and get another similar task about picking up lost items. There is a minor thrill to entering a new area and seeing a ton of things you can interact with to see completion tallies go up, but they just keep coming, the game stretching its runtime and content as far as it can go with tasks that aren’t really rewarding to complete. The design team definitely went overboard on making all these little activities without much substance to them, and while you can skip some of them, things like the Princess Faire won’t let you dance with certain characters until you’ve done enough chores for them. The charm of meeting a character is worn down by them giving you dull scavenger hunts and the quick fun of attractions really isn’t enough to counteract that most of the game’s content is focused on collecting all the stuff that somehow ended up scattered around Disneyland.

THE VERDICT: Disneyland Adventures does bring the wonder of the theme park onto the Xbox One, with its attractions like Space Mountain and Peter Pan’s Flight turning real world rides into high energy games that embrace the impossible activities video games allow as a way of amping up the spectacle and story of Disney’s most famous rides. Even the Disney characters in the park act like their cartoon selves, at least, up until the fantasy is suddenly broken with countless quests to fetch items for them. While the attractions are simple fun and sometimes visually spectacular, the park’s atmosphere is ruined a bit by constant requests to do menial tasks, something the minigames aren’t quite complex enough to completely make up for.

 

And so, I give Disneyland Adventures for Xbox One…

An OKAY rating. Ultimately and luckily, many of the chores Disney’s most famous characters give you can be avoided to play the more interesting parts and explore a rather fine recreation of a pricey real world location. Some rides like It’s a Small World are a bit bland, but then things like the Fireworks Spectacular balance things out with decent gameplay or a fun enough tale like that told by The Jungle Cruise. Head straight to the rides and you’ll have a fine time, talk with the characters only to meet them and things won’t be too bad, but it will feel like you’re dodging them to get to the better parts of the content. A player should want to talk to Tigger or Princess Tiana, not dread what chore they’ve concocted for them to complete. Still, this is definitely an excellent experience for a kid to play who won’t be too bogged down by such repetition and they’ll likely be much more impressed by the Kinect challenges where you need to pose correctly to win certain games. Even an adult can find some joy in this game trying to really make the magical kingdom feel like a mix of reality and fantasy, but the gameplay can’t quite keep up its creativity during its better moments and gets positively ridiculous when it comes to the collection quests.

 

While Disneyland Adventures ended up a decent experience for Disney fans and a pretty good fit for children’s entertainment, what ends up more baffling than its poor quest system is the troubles its conceptual follow-up Rush: A Disney-Pixar Adventure had. Styled like a smaller park based around Pixar instead of all of Disney, the game types are also focused on splitting stories up into minigames that often focus on spectacle more than the play, but the park itself is barren and the recognizable cartoon characters now nuisances. Both even began first as Kinect exclusives before being adapted to work with controllers, but Disneyland Adventures is clearly superior despite coming first because it made sure that even if it isn’t always excelling at its play or quest structures, it still captures the ideas that a theme park like Disneyland was made to embody. It’s a step into fantasy and fun for a short time, and that time with a simpler, happy life can sometimes be just the break you need.