Disney Illusion Island Starring Mickey and Friends Review – A nostalgic memory

Disney Illusion Island Starring Mickey and Friends is another entry in the long running Illusion series by Disney. Starting on the Sega Mega Drive with Castle Of Illusion, this series has been running for 35 years. Much to the like of the previous titles, Disney Illusion Island Starring Mickey and Friends maintains that level of quality expected from a Disney published game. This time Dlala Studios, known for their take on Battletoads, have decided to take a shot at making a game in a series beloved by a wider audience. The results are nothing short of good, and their take on the series is refreshing to say the least.

When an experienced gamer who played this titles thinks of the Illusion series by Disney, they imagine platformers with cooperative features. Disney Illusion Island Starring Mickey and Friends is indeed a platformer, but the twist is that it plays more like a Metroidvania mixed with the cooperative elements that makes the series so family friendly. While you can still enjoy this experience in a single player way, by playing as any Mickey, Donald, Minnie or Goofy, you can still grab a friend or parent to play with up to 4 players.

Cooperating can make exploring more fun, but even as a single player experience you feel the need to check every nook and cranny of the map, finding secrets and different routes to keep exploring the world of Monoth. However, Monoth is filled with treacherous routes to traverse, filled with plenty of hazards that you need to learn how to maneuver to be successful in your task of recovering the 3 Legendary Books of Toku, stolen by mysterious thieves. To do this, the party of heroes from which you pick to play as one of them, is blessed with some nice abilities that can help them traverse and discover new places, like how it usually happens in Metroidvanias.

One critique that can be given to the game is the fact that despite no matter what difficulty you pick, its actually quite a breeze to play through. Difficulty only modifies the amount of times you can get hit before going back to a previous checkpoint, which are in fact distributed quite close to each other. Losing is essentially reduced to a minor setback that takes away some seconds from you, and dying can even by beneficial for speedrun strategies to just warp back to a previous checkpoint without having to back track.

As this is primarily a Metroidvania game with puzzle platforming elements, combat is almost non-existent aside from some occasional boss fights that ramp up the difficulty of the title, but not by much. Disney Illusion Island Starring Mickey and Friends is clearly geared towards a younger audience, but one can’t help but think that back in the days kids actually had to deal with challenges instead of cowering away from any sort of difficulty. Challenges and failing at them is an important part of growing up and removing that from games pretty much neutralizes an important aspect of growing up with gaming.

Disney Illusion Island Starring Mickey and Friends is also a rather short title, if you are going for a play through just to finish the main game, 6 hours is all you need if you play good. Disney games are often quite easy, but I remember back in the day struggling with some of their older games that actually provided a decent challenge. Somehow, the 6 hour games of today feel shorter than the simple yet varied 1 hour games of the past. However, for the amount of content that this game provides, the 30 dollar price tag is just right and it feels like every buck you spent in it is well worth.

The art in Disney Illusion Island Starring Mickey and Friends is the biggest highlight of them all, the hand drawn style and animations of both the characters and the backgrounds are truly a sight to behold. Dlala Studios really has an amazing style when it comes to making games that look cartoonish or need to look that way. There’s even idle animations for characters when you just sit still long enough to appreciate the graphics, which is very rare to see nowadays. It shows that the people at Dlala Studios had ton of fun making this game and every corner of it feels alive.

Everything in the game is done in the style of the newest iteration of the Mickey Mouse Cartoons by Disney, and each character is quirky and fun to play due to the vast array of animations that they have. However, it is important to note that all characters are nothing more but reskins that don’t get different abilities, but the same ones with different graphics. It is obvious why this would be the case, as trying to make totally different characters for the same game can break some area design. I would admit that it would be funny to start sequence breaking the game due to some unintended consequence of giving Goofy the ability to jump higher for some reason.

I couldn’t find any way to actually do sequence breaking, which means that they actually designed the map in such a way that its nigh impossible to do it, a thing that takes lots of effort to do. Maybe some speedrunner in the future will be able to find a way to actually use an exploit to clear the game quickly, as the game lends itself to being speedran thanks to its amazingly tight and responsive controls that make you feel every movement in a fluid way. With controls like this, Disney Illusion Island Starring Mickey and Friends is truly an amazing platforming experience that can be enjoyed by anyone.

The music, much like the art of the game, is filled with tons of references to older titles and works through the entire Disney IP. It truly gives a big sense of nostalgia to listen to the nice orchestral-like compositions that accompany every area and blend seamlessly with each transition. Disney Illusion Island Starring Mickey and Friends is truly a love letter to those who have played the illusion series from the beginning, giving me lots of memories for those days I used to play World of Illusion way back in the day. Despite this, there’s something that is missing, while it tries to be the same in a way, it really isn’t and it feels new.

This is not a bad thing however, as the Illusion series of Disney is pretty much its own experience that appeals to different generations of gamers. There was a long hiatus between games, yet despite that, all of them feel closely related to each other, like that spark of nostalgia is permanent with each iteration. Maybe what’s missing is the amazing pixel art that was done back in the day, the art of the Sega Mega Drive titles looks gorgeous even today, but pixel art of that quality is quite the laborious thing to do.

Disney Illusion Island Starring Mickey and Friends Review Verdict

[Editor’s Note: Disney Illusion Island Starring Mickey and Friends  was reviewed on PC and a copy was provided to us for review purposes.]