Disney Pixar's UP

Taking some time to clear down the backlog of on-disc games, a relatively recent purchase was UP but I can’t remember why. Some arbitrary obsession with completing all movie tie in games maybe? That said, had I known how shit the game was before I started, I wouldn’t have bothered with it. I hadn’t watched the movie and following my playthrough I have no inclination to either so at least it’s saved me an hour of time back in some sort of way.

UP follows the story of two unlikeable characters, Russell and Carl, and a strange dog as you explore the world in a house attached to balloons. The premise appears to searching for some plateau for the house to go on so the old man, Carl, can retire. I’ll be honest, what was happening in the story didn’t grab my attention and was made worse by the fact that the gameplay is appalling.

So what’s bad about the gameplay? Well, for a start, world navigation and camera control is clunky and that’s being kind about it. Moving around is difficult because of the camera and it does that thing of having invisible walls which is a really dated way of limiting exploration. The most unforgiving issue though is the fact I got irrevocably stuck on the environment several times which meant reloading and losing progress and that’s just as bad as game breaking crashes, of which I had two while playing.

There is also a terrible combat element where you fight against dogs. These occur frequently throughout the game and are absolutely ridiculous. You need ninja like reactions to be able to press X in time to counter the dogs and their way of increasing difficulty towards the end of the game is simply to increase the frequency of these battles. The sheer volume of these QTE battles towards the end of the story is just plain wrong. It’s unimaginative, boring and makes the game look like a cash in. Which it is.

Graphically and musically, it’s appalling too and the game really lacks anything in the way of PIXAR charm. It’s a flat, lifeless and forgettable experience.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 42 Achievements

The achievements don’t help the game either. They are very run of the mill, straightforward and don’t add any encouragement to do anything out of the ordinary. 16 achievements are provided by completing the game but in reality, you’ll get more of these as you go through.

Most of the achievements outside of this require you to collect a myriad of different insects as you play through the game. This can only be done as Russell which is a bit annoying because if you are playing alone (and why would you want to subject another human being to this rubbish?) you will have to switch between the characters. There are also not enough bugs at the right intervals to allow this to be done without replaying a few levels, which just adds to the annoyance.

Outside of collecting stuff, there are a few miscellaneous ones related to ‘exploring’ or doing things in certain ways but the levels are so linear with very few hidden areas that getting these isn’t too much of an additional headache. The biggest pain was for completing a boss fight with two players but that’s only because I did it myself with two controllers to avoid torturing anyone else.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Disney PIXAR’s UP is a terrible game that does nothing to alleviate the stereotype that movie tie in games are absolute garbage. It’s boring. It’s bland. It’s unimaginative. It’s also overpriced because it carries the PIXAR brand. You could say the achievement list is quick as it only takes around 6 hours to get through but that’s six hours of your life that you won’t be getting back. It’s not worth playing and should be added to anyone’s avoid list.

Meet the Robinsons

The next game on the hit list is a movie tie-in game for a movie I’ve never seen and now having played the game, I most likely never will. I have decided to have a go at putting a walkthrough together for this as I ended up having to do a nearly full second playthrough due to one of the missable achievements that caused me to have a rage blackout. It’s only fair to try and save other gamers from the same fate.

Meet the Robinsons follows the story of Wilbur Robinson whose MO appears to be using a time machine to travel back in time and take pictures of himself with characters from history. The game starts with a prologue in ancient Egypt where you escape from a collapsing temple and effectively alter history. I really had to work hard to swallow the time travel liberties in the game. While I understand it’s a kid’s movie, I don’t see that as a genuine reason to trash the place with a poor time travel premise.

Anyway, the idea of the game is that the timeline gets corrupted when Wilbur goes back in time and as the player, your job is to spend 75% of the game fixing it. The whole story makes very little sense and throw in the time travel issues and it becomes simply terrible.

Gameplay wise, it’s shockingly bad. The control interface is one of the worst I’ve encountered in a long time. What I found to be bizarre was the fact that there is no jump button. Wilbur gets over obstacles by walking into them. This does make level navigation simpler, but I still thought it was a bizarre choice. As you play the game, you pick up various weapons and utilities to use against enemies and these get assigned to the Y, B and X buttons. The aiming function is where the game becomes shit. You can auto-lock on using the LB button but you won’t lock on to anything you want to aim at. You can also do manual aiming by holding down LT and pressing the button that corresponds to the weapon you want to use. I found it hit and miss whether this worked and when it did, it was incredibly fiddly and not user friendly.

In addition to the above, there are three vehicle sections that involve you getting into a giant ball and rolling through a course. The ball handles badly too so at least it’s consistent. These also have course records attached to them and if you beat the record you get some kind of reward. I only did this once on my second playthrough so I’m not sure what the rewards were. The times are essentially doing a perfect run so it makes no sense to have these as you only get one attempt per playthrough and you need to learn the course to do it well. And even then, it’s still luck-based.

Luck sums it up quite nicely when you look at the difficulty of the game. It’s not overly difficult and it feels as though it’s done to account for the sloppy gameplay – and the amount of luck you will need to get through it.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 38 Achievements

Another problem with the game is that there are a lot of collectibles and a lot of sections of the game that cannot be revisited once you’ve cleared them. Due to this, there are 14 missable achievements. Two of these are for scanning 130 objects throughout a playthrough and completing all 16 Havoc puzzles. Neither of these have any trackers so you won’t know if you done them all unless you keep a record of what you’ve done.

This is where I came unstuck as I had missed one of the Havoc puzzles due to some uncharacteristically poor tracking on my part, but lessons learned for the future.

The achievements can be broken down into three categories; mini games, main story and collectibles. Some achievements are tied to each other in that you have to collect VR discs to play against certain characters in the chargeball minigame – a fairly horrendous block-breaker game. Aside from getting all the collectibles to unlock the characters, you then need to play them. You play two games as part of the story – one tutorial which shows you how it works and one against ‘The Champ’ which is an overly long 3-match series. Apparently if you don’t win this match, you can’t rematch him without starting again but I don’t know what happens if you lose.

The rest of the matches can be played in the minigames sub menu once you’ve collected the relevant VR discs. The matches themselves are pretty easy and if you play on the tutorial level, you only have to play one game to get a win.

The other side of the mini-games involves playing a game called Security System which is a shooting gallery. There are two achievements tied to playing this which essentially require you to get 100,000 points. This is also easy. It was the first thing I did in the game and I breezed through it without really knowing what I was doing.

So that just leaves the collectibles. The scans are easy enough – just scan everything and eventually it will unlock. There is some leeway here as there are closer to 150 individual scans throughout the game and you only need 130. While I said there isn’t a tracker, two other items are obtained by scanning 100 and 110 things so you at least will know when you are nearly finished.

The last achievement I’ll talk about is the Havoc puzzles. There are 16 of them in the game and they are 2D puzzles where you navigate to an exit while avoiding ants and rocks and blowing stuff up. The controls here are no better than the main game and when it requires you be fast, you will likely fail several times because of the controls.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Having to play Meet the Robinsons twice was an episode in sheer frustration but I have no one to blame but myself for that. The controls will live in the memory for being a massive failure and the game is generally quite ugly. That said, my second playthrough took less than 6 hours and it’s probably anywhere between 8 to 10 hours to get the full completion. It’s not worth replaying.