When Disney Illusion Island popped at a Direct earlier this year it looked like a winner straight up:

  • 2D Mickey Platformer
  • New Art Style but not as gross
  • . . . and it sorta looked metroidvania-y?

So yeah, sounds like a recipe for a great game! And it had a quick turnaround from announcement to release!

This game is literally a Metroidvania. Big map split up into various biomes (they even CALL them biomes, like in-world the characters are voiced saying “go to the other biome!”). The map is a side-view map of rooms straight up like Metroid and/or Castlevania that fills in as you clear a room, with icons for unlockables and everything. You go to a zone and encounter obvious movement progression blockers, and eventually get a new movement power, and then can do everything in the zone.

The only thing it doesn’t have is combat. There’s zero real combat. You never even directly bop a boss on the head, you do stuff that results indirectly in something falling on the boss. And that’s totally fine, it doesn’t need combat, it’s a solid game even without it. What they put up largely works.

What didn’t work? I’ve only got a couple tiny tiny gripes:

  • It’s very linear, like, more linear than later Metroid games.
  • Controls are a little floaty. Jumps feel a little off because of it. It’s fine, but it feels off just enough to make some precision jumps painful.
  • Certain upgrades – like the ground-pound – suck out loud. If you have any stick input when you do the ground pound, you go flying forward uncontrollably (typically into spikes).
  • Fast travel opens up incredibly late game, almost to the point that it doesn’t matter. It just exists so if you want to try to clean up anything post-game you can.

. . but none of these things are really that bad. So what you get is a really solid pure platformer that looks and plays great. It’s not incredibly challenging, it’s not incredibly long, but it’s also not a $60 SKU so who cares?

I did a nearly 100% run after a couple days of playing, probably sub 15hrs total. The only major thing I didn’t interact with was the multiplayer, it has 1-4 player shared-screen co-op. Li’l Buddy is not quite ready for the level of platforming this game required. Soon, though. SOON. And this will probably be a great game to have him come back to, because it’s a super chill Disney adventure with incredibly reasonable checkpoints and low stakes.

Recommended. I know it’s not for everyone, but if you’re up for a chill game, it’s great.