Disney has produced a long list of amazing games that people have loved for decades. Kingdom Hearts alone will keep Disney relevant in the video game industry for years to come. But game development is hard and often tricky.
Some games released under the Disney banner didn't hit the marks fans expected of them at the time. This was for a variety of reasons, including the difficulty and time it takes to develop games, but generally, it came down to games being rushed out to meet specific deadlines or tie in with movies. Whatever the case, fans should try to avoid games like these at all costs.
10 Kinect: Disneyland Adventures Is Meant To Let Players Explore Disneyland
In 2011, Frontier Developments decided to give Disney fans a virtual taste of the Disneyland experience. Within Disneyland Adventures, players could experience some of the rides at Disneyland, but filtered through mini-games. They could still meet some of the Disney characters, including classics like Mickey and Donald Duck.
Though the experience is generally fun, it was ruined by poor controls that made playing it a hassle. The game was later remastered for Xbox One, but that version didn’t improve much on the experience.
9 Mickey Mousecapade Teams Mickey And Minnie Up In A Forgettable Experience
Mickey Mousecapade launched in 1988 on the Nintendo Entertainment System. The game focused on Mickey Mouse working to save Alice from Alice in Wonderland, which sounds like an awesome premise.
Mickey's trusty partner Minnie Mouse works alongside him as they run into a host of Disney villains. For most people, this game is so old they’ll never play it. But they aren't missing out on much. Though Minnie is following Mickey around her AI is bad and if she dies, Mickey will die as well. In other words, it's entirely possible to die without doing anything wrong.
8 Disney's Tarzan: Untamed Takes Place After The Film But Doesn't Do Anything Fun With The Characters
A game about Disney's Tarzan should have been an easy slam dunk. It’s a guy who swings through the forest and hangs out with gorillas while flexing his muscles. How hard is it to get that right? But Ubisoft Montreal’s Tarzan: Untamed for the Game Cube was a bit of a mess.
The storyline involves Tarzan battling against a British explorer named Oswald, who wants to use Tarzan as a sideshow act. So what's the issue? Well, the game frankly tries to do too much. There's waterskiing and surfing and vine-swinging but it never does any of them at a high level. Combine that with difficulty spikes and it's easy to put this game down and never look back.
7 Disney Sports Skateboarding Introduces The Disney Characters To Extreme Sports
In 2002, Konami released Disney Sports Skateboarding for the Game Cube and Game Boy Advance. Skateboarding was in, and Disney wanted to remain relevant so this made sense on its face. But the game wasn’t actually good. They tried to make Mickey Mouse and Goofy look “extreme” but they forgot to do anything else to make an actual game.
The controls are bad, the graphics are terrible, and it's just not very fun to play. The nerve involved in making this title is astounding, and it reviewed terribly as well, with IGN giving it a 3/10 and the game receiving getting a 42 on Metacritic. There's far better places for people to get their extreme sports fix.
6 A Bug's Life Is A Frustrating, Exhausting Cash-In
In 1998, a bunch of different versions of A Bug’s Life hit game store shelves. The game is a platformer where Flik goes from level to level, battling against boss characters. Though some versions of this game are worse, none of them are good.
This title had three different developers who put it out on multiple different systems, which makes it feel like it didn’t have a unified vision. That said, what people attack it for the most is that it's just a cheap cash-in for kids who wanted to enjoy a game with their new favorite character in the lead. The controls are sluggish, and even the process of targeting enemies can often feel slow and awkward.
5 Wreck-It Ralph Is An Ugly Game That Doesn't Take Advantage Of Its IP
Considering the film was a movie about video games, an actual game about Wreck-It Ralph is the obvious next move. So many of the movie’s areas and stages deserve to be explored. So they eventually released a platformer for the Wii, Nintendo 3DS, and DS... and it was absolutely terrible.
One would think a game set in the same universe as the film that was meant to be a follow-up would be taken seriously by all involved. But the game made numerous mistakes, starting with being a shockingly ugly game that didn't fit the film's story at all. And of course, despite all the interesting worlds the film explored, the game makes them all identical in terms of its level design.
4 Fantasia Wastes An Amazing Source With Weak Level Design And Bad Music
There’s no way a game about one of Disney’s most legendary films should be bad. And yet. During an era when platformers were almost the only type of games anyone was making, Disney managed to come out with a truly awful one.
The goal of the game is to travel through different levels to find musical sheets and return them to the composers. Players can travel through the stages and find all the notes to make music play but it feels like no one cared about the music, as it all sounds legitimately bad. Somehow they managed to ruin the music for a film that's literally about music. In a way, it's for the best, since Disney recalled the game and destroyed most of the copies because Fantasia was never supposed to be licensed.
3 Bolt: The Video Game Has A Weak Story
Surprisingly, Disney never did much with the Bolt franchise after the first film came out. Not even a cool television series like the Disney Afternoon shows got. It featured a dog who believed he had superpowers because he played a character on a television show. Fortunately, when Avalanche Software made the game, they set it within the fictional television series. This granted all of Bolt's superpowers, including his patented "Superbark" and laser vision.
That said, the player can also control Bolt's owner, Penny, to change the gameplay up a bit, as she sneaks around to take enemies down on a quest to find Penny's father. The concept is good, but the story is almost non-existent. Those looking for a challenge should look elsewhere, as the game will constantly offer guides on what to do and the combat becomes repetitive early in the game. It's a short game but players will grow tired of it long before they finish it.
2 Hannah Montana: The Movie Poorly Balances Life As Miley And Hannah
Hannah Montana was one of Disney's biggest stars in the 2000s, so it made sense to eventually make a game based on the series. Ideally, this would be a straightforward game that could balance Miley Stewart's life as a normal person with Hannah Montana's life as a superstar pop artist.
However, the game doesn't put enough thought into Miley's time as a regular kid. Though players do eventually get to play as Hannah Montana and perform at concerts, doing so isn't engaging. This might have even been better if it had some Rock Band elements in it where players could just sing the songs themselves instead of making it a tedious mini-game. It's a short game, but the time people spend on it isn't really worth it.
1 Disney Epic Mickey 2: The Power of Two Was So Bad It Sunk The Epic Mickey Franchise
The original Disney Epic Mickey is one of the best Disney games, referencing tons of classic Disney characters who weren't really used anymore. The new one adds in the option for co-op by allowing another player to play as Oswald. Both Mickey and Oswald are pulled into another adventure for the sake of saving the Wastelands again. The true problem with Epic Mickey 2 isn't that it is a bad game.
So much of what players loved about the first game is back for this one. But the developers didn't improve on anything Epic Mickey did wrong, and what they added actively made the experience worse. The game adds bad voice acting and tedious puzzles and doesn't actually fix the camera issues that plagued the original game. And that's the real problem. Lack of innovation sunk a potentially great franchise for Mickey Mouse, a character that's still looking for the relevance he deserves.