Where's My Mickey? XL Review

Disney’s Where’s My Water series has been both a success both financially as well as creatively, with its original incarnation bringing unique physics gameplay and an original character to the table. Now, Disney has expanded the series in part by integrating their known characters into the gameplay. The problem has been that they just haven’t fit all that well: Perry from Phineas & Ferb in Where’s My Perry felt like Disney just slapping a character into the formula, and to me at least, it fell flat.

So now, we have Where’s My Mickey, which ramps up the character integration from “secondary character on a Disney Channel animated series” to“ the very face of Disney.” Thankfully, the Disney folks decided that with their superstar, they had to bring their A-game to Where’s My Mickey and by gosh golly, they nailed it.

The gameplay is at its core the same as it was before: cut dirt and interact with objects to get enough water from wherever it starts to the goal area. Along the way, there’s three stars to try and fill up with water to collect, hazardous fluids that must be kept away from the goal area but may come in handy at other times to solve other puzzles.

Clouds play a huge role in this game: most of the levels require manipulating them in a myriad number of ways. The most basic of ways is just dropping water by tapping on them, but using wind to move the clouds around becomes important as well, and they even serve as shields from the lava that exists in certain segments as well. Their versatility makes this feel like a true iteration on the formula, rather than as a cash-grab by including Mickey.

Speaking of, Mickey is an interesting choice for the next in the Where’s My Water series, but thematically this is a much better fit than Where’s My Perry, at least thanks to the different level concepts making good use of why getting the water to Mickey is so important. It’s a small thing, but it really does make a difference! The use of animation such as the anthropomorphization of objects like stars, with them panicking when bad elements are around, adds a lot. Mickey feels like a living character. The animations after each level add to the personality of the game.

While the game now comes in separate iPhone and iPad editions, at least the iPad “XL” edition comes with a new set of levels that take advantage of the bigger iPad screen. These space-themed levels feature a scope that hasn’t really been seen in the series yet.

Where’s My Mickey is charming, fun, and most importantly, feels like it has a good reason to exist.