HomeReviewsDisney Epic Mickey: Rebrushed
Disney Epic Mickey: Rebrushed review: a faithful remaster of a paint-splashing platformerAn old master?
An old master?
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/THQ Nordic
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/THQ Nordic
And no, Rebrushed doesn’t let him do anything of these either. Clearly a missed opportunity. But is it better nonetheless? With an updated look, some added secrets, more moves for Mickey, and controller/M&K support, I’d say longtime Mickey heads will adore this nostalgia trip. For total newcomers like me, I’d say it’s a platformer that’s certainly charming and clever and wonderfully experimental, but a bit flat in places too.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/THQ Nordic
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/THQ Nordic
While I never played the Wii version, I imagine that some physicality has been lost as you fling paint around. The mouse or thumbstick works wonderfully, but I wonder if Epic Mickey veterans might find the act robbed of its purposefulness. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/THQ Nordic
Through Mickey’s travels, you’ll pass through sewery slums, wrecked theme parks with rickety rockets, crumbling ruins, fire-stricken towns, and pirate-infested isles. You move through these spaces at quite a pace, too, as each spot is broken up into easily digestible mechanical conundrums. Almost all of which have you tick things off a checklist: get the masks, find the switches, rescue the pals. A lot of what you’ll do is run around a space and search for the highlighted bits, filling or thinning as is often quite obvious. You might need to flip a switch up on the thingamajig, so you paint some platforms to get there. A chest might be alight, so you thin the platform above it where water barrels rest. The best bits have you paint or thin cogs, so they help spin or hold platforms in place for you.
You unlock some powers as you go, like one that lets you drop TVs to distract enemies or power specific plates on the floor. Another lets you slow down time for a bit. They’re useful in very limited scenarios, basically. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/THQ Nordic
After you’ve burst out of these levels, you might end up in a couple of hub spaces you’ll return to a handful of times over the course of the story. The main one being Mean Street, home to vendors with menial sidequests that’ll grant you either: 1) a collectible pin or 2) an orb. Those pins feature a lot, often as rewards for finding secret spots as you thin or paint stuff out in the world, which is infuriating for me as a person who doesn’t care for them, but may satisfy those of you who love this sort of thing. Anyway, yeah, there’s also a Gremlin in Mean Street who asks you to grab him however many orbs to power more portals to 3D levels, and thus, more mandated Mickeying.
Said mandated Mickeying does feature some interesting decision-making, though, which remains more “interesting” than it does actually impactful - but still. At the most basic level, combat revolves around painting enemies or thinning them. Paint them enough and they’ll turn friendly, while thinner just outright erases them (some enemies can only be thinned, then spin attacked). Some levels have Gremlins trapped in cages, too, where they might offer to fix or fudge bits around the map to either make your route to the main objective a bit easier, or open up a room to yet another pissing pin. Another time, I gave a pirate some ice cream to woo a lady he was into, without consulting what the lady may have wanted. Apparently she wasn’t into ice cream.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/THQ Nordic
