Perhaps it’s all a subtle allegory about the South African diamond mining trade.ĭie-hard Mickey fans - there must be some of them out there - and those (like me) with fond memories of the original will still have plenty of fun throwing Mickey around Castle Of Illusion, but newer gamers might find it a bit limited.This game is a little weird to talk about from where I'm sitting. It’s a top-notch title with a superb sense of visual style, but that’s matched to some old-school gaming mechanics, and as much as I can say that I appreciate them personally, I’m not blinded to the fact that even platform games have moved along a little since the early 1990s. That price point is something of a problem, simply because there are so many very good platform games on the iOS platform that you can get for a fraction of Castle Of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouse’s asking price. Castle Of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouse: Fat Duck verdict Castle Of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouse: PricingĬastle Of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouse is a premium priced iOS title with an asking price of $10.49 at the time of writing. You will have to master multiple jumps in turn, and there are a few dead drop situations, and that’s part of the appeal - or it should be. Some may find the brutalist old-school approach to platforming a bit off-putting, but I’ve got to say that I’m personally happy it’s still there. It would be perfectly feasible, even with some difficulty spikes to make your way through it in around 4 hours or so of total play time. That does expose its relatively short running time, however. That’s one thing that Castle Of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouse in its iOS incarnation doesn’t do, because it’s meant to be mobile, and you may get a call, or decide to do something else. Step by step, heart to heart, left right left, etc…
I sometimes wonder as to the completion percentages for games of that era, not just because of difficulty spikes, but also because of the lack of save states.
Castle Of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouse: On the minus sideĬlassic platform games rarely had save points, and that meant that they could get away with relatively short running times, because you’d have to play through the entire game in a single sitting to see everything. It works, although there are sections where the game isn’t all that easy and a physical controller would probably be easier to handle. The basic control scheme uses left hand swipes for movement, right hand taps for jumping and a single interaction and throwing button onscreen. Platform game controls are a hard nut to crack, but I can’t really fault Sega Australia’s work here. Mickey’s gone from 16-bit wandering through libraries with flat features to a 3D realised world with a lot of attention to detail in little bits of background animation. They’re crisp and beautifully animated, but then this is a port of a digital-only game that came out on (ahem) “proper” consoles some months back. She’s called Mizrabel because Disney has little tolerance for non-conventional standards of beauty.Įasily the best thing about Castle Of Illusion are the visuals. There are some nods to progress with limited 3D sections that blend in quite well when you’re playing, but if you’re not a platform fan this really won’t appeal.
You run, jump, bottom bounce and sometimes throw projectiles at enemies in a mostly 2D universe. in the same way that just about everything currently is a military shooter. The day I find a mouse in my library is the day that mouse DIES.
Castle Of Illusion is a platform game from a time when just about everything was platform games, I can’t really blame the magical library.