Disney's Planes, available on all current
Nintendo platforms, shuns the film's
storyline in favour of a series of fresh
adventures for its airborne cast. Disney
Interactive
There are few movies more naturally
suited to game adaptation than Disney's
Planes, a film that's essentially just one
long aerial race through a series of exotic
locations around the globe.
All a developer needs to do, it would
seem, is cut the story into recognizable
levels — a series of races through the
Himalayas here, a collection of circuits
through the Nevada desert there — spice
it up with a few quirky challenges during
overnight pit-stops in cities, and presto:
Instant kids game.
Instead, Behavior Interactive — the studio
Disney Interactive hired to make a game
based on its parent company's film —
chose to go its own way.
Had the studio come up with some bold
new play concepts and constructed a
narrative that meaningfully expanded
upon what we already know about the
film's characters, this might have been an
applause-worthy move. After all, game
adaptations of kids movies represent a
genre brimming with half-hearted cash-
grabs.
Sadly, the game Behavior has delivered is
even less ambitious and more forgettable
than a straight retelling of the film's story
might have been.
Disney Interactive
The story mode is a series of brief —
some as short as a minute-and-a-half —
missions that relate previously unknown
adventures in the lives of the film's main
characters.
Our primary protagonist, Dusty
Crophopper, flies around his farmyard
'hood ploughing through bales of hay,
zapping tornadoes to make them
disappear, spraying fields, and painting
barns.
If kids can get past the downright ugly
graphics (the Wii U version is clearly just a
lightly up-scaled port of the Wii edition,
which itself is no visual arts award
winner), they'll likely find the piloting
controls simple and intuitive. They may
also find that some of the objectives —
such as lighting fire pits with a flare gun
— are actually kind of fun, at least to
start.
But as they work through the four
missions given each character they'll
quickly realize that goals repeat at an
alarming rate.
Dusty plants crops in one mission by
flying over rectangular fields, then Ishani
harvests flowers from similar patches of
soil using an identical mechanic in
another. Ishani flies into a cloud to collect
lightning energy in one of her chapters
and then Bulldog follows suit in a mission
in which he's trying to restore power to a
town pub. The number of substantively
different goals between characters is
pitifully low.
Some might point out that this is a game
for younger kids, and they generally learn
through and often enjoy repetition. But
even my little eight-year-old tester was
quickly growing bored as she plugged
through one cookie-cutter challenge after
another.
It's just lazy game design, plain and
simple.
Disney Interactive
As players work through the story
missions, which shouldn't take most kids
longer than around four hours to
complete, they'll eventually unlock a few
other modes.
The first simply has kids flying through
coloured balloons with an aim to pop
them, earn points, and reach a target
score. The second is a series of checkpoint
races through hoops and pylons. The final
is a free-flight mode in which you can fly
around the small environments from the
story mode looking for golden puzzle
pieces floating in the air that combine to
create little postcards.
But again, each of these modes boil down
to variations on things kids have already
done in the story mode, where they
occasionally raced foes, smashed through
various items, and hunted for collectibles.
It's a pretty unimaginative way to extend
an already lacklustre gaming experience.
Disney Interactive
I'll grant that Behavior didn't have much
to work with in terms of source material.
The Cars/Planes mythology is unusually
weak for a world conceived by the creative
masterminds at Pixar. I still can't get past
the fact that the machines in these films
inhabit a world clearly designed by and
for humans. And the personalities that
inhabit them are, by dint of both
hackneyed writing and clunky character
design, uninspired and generally
unmemorable.
But a game about flying has potential to
soar where the film on which it is based
might crash and burn. You get to fly
planes like an ace pilot, for heaven's sake.
Nothing about that should be boring.
And yet it is. Even for kids.
Of course, that's not allowing for the wee
superfans of the Cars and Planes movies
anxious to devour anything bearing the
films' logos simply because they can't get
enough talking cartoon vehicles.
For those of you who happen to have
spawned some of these kids, here's some
shopping advice: The Wii U edition is the
best for children who want to play
together. It costs $10 more than the
$39.99 Wii edition and (as already
mentioned) isn't much prettier for it.
However, it allows a second player to join
in using the Wii U Gamepad screen rather
than resorting to split-screen play. That
means each player has a full 16:9 aspect
ratio of the action, which makes for a far
better local multiplayer experience. Plus,
it's just kind of cool.
Everyone else, meanwhile, can feel safe in
taking a pass on this thoroughly mediocre
spin-off of a film that is only marginally
more entertaining.
Posted in: FP Tech Desk Tags: Post Arcade,
Controller Freak , Disney Planes , Game
Reviews , Nintendo Co. Ltd. , Nintendo Wii
U , Wii U Game Reviews, Wii U Reviews
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