Games with a Disney license are always quite easy to evaluate, because in my experience they only come in two forms: either a grandiose adventure or a quick and cheap license recycling. Today’s game definitely belongs in the first category, mainly because of some interesting features. Let’s discuss them here.

We’ve already tried a few Disney games, which sometimes convinced us more, sometimes less; I’ve never had a title like “Up” though. In theory, it is a simple 3D platformer game, as we already know it from titles like “Peter Pan”. These vary at most in the quality of the engine and the resulting gameplay and graphics, depending on the developer. However, “Up” relies heavily on an otherwise rather short-lived aspect: multiplayer.

But let’s start from the beginning. I’m assuming you know the plot of the film, if not: go and watch it now, it’s awesome!

Now that we are all on the same page again, here we go: we follow the story in the game from the moment we arrive at Paradise Falls with the house. There it floats away and our further journey consists of catching it again. Then about halfway through the game we get it back and the next major goal, which is also the finale, is to stop Charles Muntz (the bad guy). So far, so well known.

The first part of the film, where Carl starts his journey, is only outlined in a cinematic sequence at the beginning, but it is done beautifully. All in all, I found the cutscenes to be very well done – not too graphically demanding since we had a copy for the PlayStation 2, but still very nice to look at. It was only slightly inferior to the film.

Now let’s get to the interesting part: the gameplay itself. Because here I was immediately reminded of a mixture of the Lego games and “It Takes Two” – Lego because you can play the game alone, “It Takes Two” because the focus was definitely on the multiplayer aspect. There was practically no point where you could progress on your own without taking the other person with you (something that is possible especially with the first Lego games like “Star Wars”), but it never felt forced to me; rather that the two characters Russel and Carl complement each other very well.

The game was able to keep a good balance: the parts where it mattered had to be mastered together – for example paddling on a raft or gliding with the house in the air. There were also a few places where the different characteristics of the two characters came into their own.

Each of them also had special items to use; Carl could beep his hearing aid to scare away enemies, Russel could use a mirror to set things on fire or blind individual enemies. In multiplayer you could and had to work together very well here, as a single player I could switch between the two characters at any time.

The competitive idea was not neglected either: in between there were always smaller mini-games, especially in the form of a bug hunt: Russel had to save as many as possible, Carl to crush them. There were other games as well, but you would have had to unlock them first – the game didn’t really fascinate me that much (and I didn’t have a real opponent either).

The AI was pleasantly smart – not so much that you didn’t stand a chance, not so stupid that you didn’t have motivation. Most of the enemies were only triggered by proximity, so there wasn’t much intelligence to judge here – but overall it was pretty well done.

It was the interesting mix of features that made me think of “It Takes Two”. Not only did this make it a lot of fun to play, it also illustrated the relationship between the two characters very well. The film does a great job of showcasing the bond that forms, and the game is no different. Given that this is a game more aimed at children, I think that siblings in particular can (or could, the game is old) have a lot of fun with the repeatable mini-games.

Finally, on the technical side, the game has an autosave feature that rather saves too often than too rarely – very nice. Unfortunately, we had a bug at one point that made it impossible to continue playing; a quick restart of the console later, however, we were able to start right back where we left off – this time completely error-free. This was only a minor annoyance and in no way dampened my positive overall impression of the game.

So what is my conclusion? I think the game is awesome, almost ahead of its time considering the long wait afterwards for games like “A Way Out” or “It Takes Two”. I haven’t seen any other game that takes up this idea of co-op so well and combines it with such a fitting story – I’m absolutely thrilled!

What do you think about this game? Have you ever played it yourself? Was it fun to watch? Do you know any similar games that I should look at again? Join the discussion on Discord!