TLDR: If you're looking for a fun and chill game to play with kids, this is NOT it.
This is not the kind of game you can enjoy in coop, especially with a child. The game is overall OK when played alone, despite the dated graphics, simplistic level design and primitive combat. But when there is at least one other player, it turns into a tiresome mayhem that just makes you want to quit. And here's why:
1. There is friendly fire among players, and since your attacks have a large swinging motion or even a 360 degrees area of effect, you have to strategically place yourself in a way that wouldn't hurt your partner, which is a complicated notion for a child. But even when you’re careful, quite often you're forced to fight enemies on a small platform, where there is not much room to avoid hitting each other. As a result, half the time you end up killing each other, which is not much fun.
2. The enemies hit pretty hard for a game with such an obvious visual appeal to a younger audience. Even the little minions can spawn with a tier 4 weapon that practically one-shots you. And then there are the mini-bosses, which are quite tanky, pack a punch, and don’t offer a clear strategy to defeat them. You might eventually notice that the levels have bombs you can pick up and throw, but they don’t home to enemies, so you’re likely to miss most of your shots, and since they don’t deal much damage anyway, you might be better off sticking to your double jump AOE attacks.
3. The camera can be frustrating even in solo mode, as it always has a fixed angle, making some items or even your character obscured by the level’s geometry. But in coop, it zooms out trying to capture all playable characters in one frame, making it harder to navigate the levels and easier to confuse which character is which. Sometimes, a path leads towards the screen, so you have to walk it blindly, risking to suddenly fall off a platform’s edge that you have no way to see beforehand. Platforming is a totally miserable experience on its own, as the game’s graphics make it hard to gauge the depth of the character’s or platform’s position (i.e. how far they are from the screen), leading to many deaths due to missed jumps.
4. As if to add insult to injury, the game also punishes you for dying by making you lose some of that hard earned gold. Based on my observations, the penalty might be a percentage of your score (perhaps 10%), and at higher scores (around 1000) it can be a hefty sum, which is infuriating. Sometimes it’s just deducted from your score without giving you the chance to reclaim it. But even when it is dropped on the spot where you died, it despawns rather quickly. And since your death and respawning animations take too much time, most of the time you end up watching it all despawn before your eyes without being able to prevent that from happening. A truly remarkable experience, especially for younger gamers.
5. Lastly, in solo mode there are powerups scattered around the levels that you can strategically use to deal with big groups of enemies or mini-bosses. But in coop, for some reason, the powerups stop being stationary items that you can pick up, and instead randomly spawn and start following the players and activate upon contact. To “spice things up”, half the time they are swapped with debuffs that make you slow and more vulnerable to enemies, or downright kill you and/or take a portion of your gold. The cherry on top is that this happens totally at random, and often in the most inopportune moments. So, you might have to fight a mini-boss and a dozen of minions while simultaneously running away from a debuff that is chasing you, and then once you’ve defeated everyone, a powerup spawns when it is completely useless.
6. During all that chaos you have to somehow still pay attention to the task that you need to complete in order to progress. The text appears on the screen for a few seconds, and you cannot review it in the pause menu.
7. Last but not least, as seems to be standard with Disney games, the controls cannot be remapped, and the default controls for PC were likely programmed by someone who never played any game on PC and/or hates PC players. How else would you explain assigning direction controls to arrow keys, while having Space for jumping, C for attacking, and V for interacting? Totally unacceptable and deserving a negative review for this reason alone. Luckily, if you’re still inclined to try this game with a keyboard, you can create a simple script in an app called AutoHotkey and run it after launching the game. Mine looks like this:
w::Up
a::Left
s::Down
d::Right
Numpad5::c
Numpad1::v
It might help you with the controls, but it won’t help with all the other issues that ruined my enjoyment of this game.
Conclusion: While this game is visually appealing to younger players, it’s far too hard, chaotic and overall frustrating to be enjoyed by them. And while the difficulty seems to be geared towards more seasoned players, I don’t think most of them would find the game’s design all that engaging. This is truly a mismatch between visuals and gameplay, which almost seems like false advertisement.
3/10
