Hands-on review: Disneyland Adventures is not the happiest place on Earth

Disneyland is often referred to as the 'Happiest Place On Earth". Sadly though, you will be doing a lot of frowning if you choose to play Disneyland Adventures on Xbox One and Windows 10 PC.

Originally released several years ago on Xbox 360, Disneyland Adventures was a Kinect exclusive. Now a new version of the game is out on Xbox One and Windows 10 PC allowing gamers to play it without the use of motion controls.

I played this game on the Xbox One X and what I like about it are the pretty bright visuals. Disneyland Adventures recreates Disneyland as an open world theme park and it's pretty cool just to roam around and explore the area.

At the start of the game, you create your own avatar and then you can start roaming the theme park in order to do a lot of quests. It's pretty much a game made full of mini-games.

There's lot of recognisable Disney franchises/characters included in the game. You can go inside the worlds of Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, Mickey Mouse and a whole lot more. The only franchises missing are Star Wars and Marvel.  Even though this game is aimed at very young kids, I did not find myself enjoying this very much. Sadly, Disneyland Adventures has a very clunky HUD and I often found myself getting lost.

The waypoint system in this game is atrocious, not to mention the game suffers from a lot of bugs and glitches. In order to get to a waypoint, you just have to follow an unreliable orange line that often changes its direction.

To make things even worse, sometimes characters don't load up in time for you to speak them. There have been countless times I would arrive at my destination, but Goofy or any other character is missing. I would often have to come back a few minutes later until their character models appear.

When I first played the game, a whole portion of the game's textures failed to load up too. Granted, this may not happen to everyone but one would expect glitches would have been fixed since this is a re-release.  The gameplay in Disneyland Adventures is also uneventful and not very fun. Most of the gameplay revolves you doing mundane fetch quests such as finding some junk for the Disney characters.  When you enter one of the attractions, the gameplay is then just a bunch of quick time events (QTEs). This includes a variety of things such as fighting Captain Hook with a wooden sword to even dancing your way to victory.

The game is much better to play with a Kinect device than on a normal controller. The game seems kind of pointless playing on a normal controller as all you are really doing is interacting with button prompts. At least with the Kinect, you can somewhat get some exercise.

That said, I'm unsure who the target market is for Disneyland Adventures. I worked at a school earlier this year and those kids were more interested in Star Wars, Marvel and WWE. As for video games, they liked NBA 2K and Battlefront 2.

The only people that might enjoy this game are protective parents with young kids aged eight and under. It's a type of game with no violence, although once kids get older they will want to play games such as Call of Duty and more...

It's hard for me to recommended buying this game on Xbox One and Windows 10 PC because Disneyland Adventures has lots of glitches and unexciting gameplay. Only parents with toddlers might like this and that's about it. 

Verdict: 5.0/10