Disney Epic Mickey: Rebrushed PC Review
Summary: Disney Epic Mickey: Rebrushed is a fantastic example of a remaster done correctly. Maintaining the feel of the original while bringing it up to a modern standard.
4.1
Brushed Up!
If there’s any console in the post-PS2 world that we live in whose game library could use modern remasters, it’s the Wii. Nintendo’s little white cuboid wasn’t known for pushing cutting-edge graphics, even when compared to the generation before.
Outside of Nintendo’s first-party titles, very few exclusive games from the Wii have been ported to modern hardware, and even fewer still have come to non-Nintendo platforms.
Disney Epic Mickey was originally released in 2010 in Japan and 2011 in the rest of the world. It was developed by Junction Point Studios, with Warren Spector of Deus Ex fame at the helm. Disney Epic Mickey: Rebrushed seeks to update the game to modern standards and bring it to all modern platforms. Development of the remaster has been handled by Purple Lamp and published by THQ Nordic.
Primarily a platformer, Epic Mickey: Rebrushed follows Mickey Mouse and a host of other notable Disney characters as they dive into the fantastical world of ‘Wasteland’. A world that is never explicitly stated as being a ruined Disneyland but is very heavily implied to be. Overrun by the ‘Blot’, Mickey and Co have to free the wasteland from their clutches and return colour to the world.
The world is split into small sections that branch off from a hub town. Each of these sections functions as a miniature level, complete with its own puzzles, enemies, and secrets. They’re mostly very simplistic and don’t take very long to get through, a few minutes in some cases. They’re strung together in such a way that they don’t feel like individual levels, however, feel more like small sections of a larger interconnected world.
Each level is bookended by very short, 2D levels. Each of these is based on a cartoon from Disney’s history. They reference many of their early works, including ‘Steamboat Willie’, ‘Giantland’, and ‘Mickey’s Steam Roller’. These tiny levels are charming and an excellent throwback to the origins of the franchise.
Aside from the platforming, the core mechanic of Disney Epic Mickey: Rebrushed is the use of the magic brush wielded by Mickey. The right trigger allows paint to be fired from the brush. Doing so can bring certain objects back into existence, recreating destroyed terrain and rebuilding paths forward. The left trigger dispenses thinner, which does the opposite. Removing objects from the world, destroying obstacles, and wiping out enemies.
This painting and thinning of the environment and enemies make up the majority of the puzzles and traversal in the game. Paint gears into existence to make a machine work, thin a wall down to nothing to get to the switch behind it, and use the brush to restore stairs to the next area, etc.
On the gameplay front, and in general, it’s an uncomplicated game. It’s done well enough, though, and is enjoyable for the most part. Despite this, Disney Epic Mickey: Rebrushed is still largely indicative of the era it’s originally from though. From about the halfway point of the game, progress is arbitrarily blocked off until a set number of collectibles have been found. These are given as rewards for side quests and are occasionally found hidden away in the world. The problem is that many of these side quests are simple fetch quests, often only requiring the delivery of an item and requiring significant amounts of backtracking to complete.
There’s no fast travel system and every one of the 2D platforming sections that sit between the 3D levels has to be run through every time. While they’re charming on the first or second run-through, by the fourth or fifth, they’ve started to outstay their welcome. I’m not inherently against backtracking or even fetch quests, but it has to be done well to not be boring, and these start to get boring. Purple Lamp have taken steps to update the areas of the game too. There’s new sections, secrets, and puzzles, so steps to mitigate this a little weren’t out of the question.
On a more positive note, the controls have been tightened up significantly from the Wii original. Camera wrangling is no longer an issue (something the original struggled with), and several new moves have been added to Mickey’s repertoire, including a dash, ground pound, and sprinting. All of these make getting around the world far smoother and generally very fun to do.
The most obvious update to the game is the visuals, which is hardly surprising given that the original came out nearly 15 years ago. Thanks to the art style employed in the original game, it still holds up relatively well and now looks even better thanks to a hefty resolution boost and the addition of new visual effects. It’s a massive update and does a great job of bringing the game up to modern standards. Performance is rock solid too for the most part, as you might expect, never wavering once from 60 frames per second other than on initial load of an area for a second while Unreal generates a shader cache.
Disney has always had fantastic audio and sound design in almost everything they’ve done, and this is no exception. The score is nothing short of fantastic and manages to live up to the expectations that come with something that has their name on it. Music is typically quite dark to reflect the general theme of the game, but still manages to be uplifting on occasion and almost always fits the space it’s in.
Final Thoughts
Disney Epic Mickey: Rebrushed is a remaster of an old game done right. While I think that some more steps could have been taken to alleviate the tedium of late-game backtracking, it’s far from a deal breaker.
Purple Lamp has done a great job of bringing the game forward to a new generation while retaining the core of what made the game fun in the first place.
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