Dineyland Adventures

November 19th, 2011

Disney land is a long way away, even the Paris one, and it’s really expensive. Luckily a cheaper alternative is finally upon us in the form of Disneyland Adventures for Kinect on Xbox 360, developed by Frontier Developments famous for Kinectimals. Now you can keep the kids happy without having to raid the savings or mingle with French tourists.

The first thing you’ll notice is the Disney style and authenticity that pours off the screen; everything looks as it should and everybody sounds as they should, so much so that even the older gamer will feel a few moments of nostalgia seeing favorites brought to life (providing you liked Disney as a child and, lets face it, who didn’t).

Disneyland adventures recreates the experience of going to the magic kingdom without having to get up at 5am to make the flight, you can explore the park and meet all your favorite Disney stars along the way, from classic characters such as Mickey Mouse to more modern additions such as Buzz Lightyear. When you find the characters you can hug them or high five them, and collect their autograph through the use of body gestures. Yes that’s right you have to hug an imaginary man dressed as a fictional Mouse – the things we games journalists have to go through!

The park recreation is pretty good although the (Lucasarts owned attractions like Indiana Jones are missing, in name at least) allowing you to travel around famous places that anyone who visited the park will remember, such as Main street U.S.A, Tommorowland and Mickey’s toon town. In addition to the park’s locations, twenty different rides have been included such as the Haunted mansion and Buzz Lightyear astro blasters, but with a twist as these take the form of some quirky minigames. Its no doubt what the ride designers would have come up with if it weren’t for the pesky limitations of reality.

As you’ve probably guessed this game is focused squarely at children (or the child at heart) and every facet of the game is tailored to that notion. Traveling around the park is controlled by pointing at where you want to go as a child would (and provides one of the most elegant solutions we’ve seen to the problem of locamotion in Kinect games) and early on you’re given a magic wand that lets you bring objects to life like the famous Fantasia cartoon.

Other than the exploration aspect of the game the core of the gameplay comes in the form of mini games and adventures given to you by the various mascots around the park, be it Peter Pan flying through London or fishing with the cast of the Jungle book. All the games are simple to play and for the most part free of the gremlins that sometimes plague motion controlled games.

Disneyland Adventures supports the Kinect standard features such as two player drop in drop out multiplayer allowing two people to play the mini games at once (although only one player can control movement around the park) the voice controls are used for navigating the map (instead of the pointing mentioned earlier) allowing you to simply say the location you want to go to.

Disneyland Adventures is a great family game and although there is a fairly large amount to see and do it will become repetitive rather quickly for anyone over a certain age. It can be enjoyed more by children or as a parent/younger child duo. It’s hard to fault Disneyland adventures however as it achieves what it set out to do while providing a more imaginative use of the Kinect camera than the usual mini game collection by adding the exploration aspect, making it feel a more like a complete game.

Words > Jason Potter

Tags: Disneyland Adventures, Frontier Developments, Kinect, Microsoft Studios, Xbox 360