In Epic Mickey 2 you take control of Mickey and Oswald, hence the name ”Power of Two”. While Mickey is a staple in all Mickey games, Oswald was introduced in Epic Mickey for the Wii and played a major role there as well (as far as I know).
Mickey’s main tool during gameplay is a brush. With this brush he can either use paint to create items in the environment or paint thinner to remove unwanted paint. This is a major part of the gameplay since you must change your environment to overcome obstacles and find secrets. Another prominent game mechanic is special stickers that cast special “wonders”; for example expanding a building.
Oswald has some sort of a universal remote which can manipulate all kinds of electrical circuits, including robots. He takes a big part in the gameplay because of this as now and then you will come to dead ends where you need his help to open a path to the next level. One problem with Oswald is that you can’t really control him directly and A.I. can be really dumb sometimes; he could be standing right in front of a circuit but not acting on it.
The light at the end of the tunnel is that Oswald can (much like the 3 non-player characters in Secret of Mana) be controlled by a second player, which decreases the frustration by a large amount. So yes, there is multiplayer in game; but before you jump up with joy I have to say one more thing about the multiplayer; it’s local multiplayer only – meaning that your friend has to be next to you to use it (if you aren’t using tools like tungle). Why they decided to use ad-hoc only when infrastructure mode is so ubiquitous is beyond me, a good online multiplayer would have worked better.
The story could be right out of a Disney movie. The game plays in Wasteland – the home of forgotten and rejected Disney characters, which was recently plagued by violent earthquakes which have destroyed parts of the world. Mickey is once again summoned to Wasteland by Gus, the leader of ethic group of said world. After a short amount of time he runs into the Mad Doctor again (the main villain of the first game). He is now seemingly helping the people of Wasteland; but has he really turned over a new leaf, or is he up to something sinister? That you’ll have to find out yourself.
The graphics are on a high standard and have a prominent part in giving the feel of a Disney movie. It’s very atmospheric and has both kinds of color pallets’ sometimes it can be really shiny and colorful, but at the same time and can be dark and heavy. While the graphics and all are nice, it suffers from some serious frame-rate issues – clear evidence of a half-hearted port from the big consoles as the Vita has far more power than a simple game like this should need.
The worst thing about the frame-rate is that you can’t even say that the issue is with the developers not knowing the Vita. The game was handled by guys who should know the Vita the best, the firm who had the most time to get warm with the vita since they produced her; yes, I’m talking about Sony. Sony brought the source code from Interactiv and ported it to the Vita themselves. That said, you would expect that the game would run flawlessly – but it doesn’t.
In the sound department Micky epic doesn’t have to dread the comparison to Disney movie or other games, you can clearly hear that the game is a homage to older Disney movies, the sound track has both kind of music, luck one if need and dark ones, in between are many more kind of tracks.
Even more cool is that they used all the current voice-synchro actors from the carton for the characters. This is a quite nice touch for all fans of the characters used. The characters themselves are another good point about the game; it features all new Disney characters such as Oswald and his girlfriend Ortensia ,Gus the lead the leader of the gremlins (which are something like technicians who repair all technical machines in Wasteland) and then of course your favourite Disney classics like Goofy and Donald Duck.
But is all this enough to make a it a good game?
While yes the game is fun, has memorable characters, a huge amount of content, the rescuing of imprisoned Gremlins and damn good voice acting; it has some major flaws too. The frame-rate and the limited multiplayer weigh heavily in the flaw category.
All said though, it’s a good game with some flaws – and again for all platform fans and/or Disney fans it’s a must have.
