Into The Vault: The Lion King: Simba’s Mighty Adventure (PlayStation)

With the release of Mufasa on Disney Plus today, I thought I’d take a look back at the last game really based on the original film to come out, The Lion King: Simba’s Mighty Adventure. Much like the 1994 16-bit game this game does take you through the story of Disney’s hit animated film, but obviously with a more modern take and including some scenes from the film in-between levels.

Clearly, The Lion King: Simba’s Mighty Adventure is not as fondly remembered as the 16-bit take on Simba’s journey from cub to king, but does it deserve to be mostly forgotten?

The first point of The Lion King: Simba’s Mighty Adventure that definitely might turn some people off is that it has rather than gorgeous hand-drawn levels gone the polygonal route as so many games did in the day. They didn’t look great then and they’ve aged pretty poorly. But for the standards of the time, they were acceptable so I’ll not quibble over this particular point too much. I will say the constraints become incredibly clear when say there’s a level where you are supposed to be outrunning a stampeding herd of wildebeests and the best the game can manage is at most three at a time.

But graphical shortcomings are easy to ignore when the actual gameplay of The Lion King: Simba’s Mighty Adventure is a much greater crime. First, even though it’s a 3D platformer, you have to use the directional pad. The Dual Shock controller came out in 1997 this is a 2000 release it should certainly at least have the option for analogue stick controls. Without it, Simba is very hard to control which leads to countless cheap hits and deaths from falling.

Though even with those controls as an option, The Lion King: Simba’s Mighty Adventure still would play pretty badly. Collision detection is laughable, jumps are way too floaty often leading you to miss platforms and die and aiming at enemies accurately to roar, role on pounce on them is nigh impossible. There are some 2D levels but they still suffere from the same issues of bad aiming and floaty controls. Really the only good decisions made here was to give you a pretty decent health bar and make it easy to earn lives. Almost as if they knew this was going to be a very cheap and frustrating game to play…

Unfortunately, The Lion King: Simba’s Pride falls victim to being the bad stereotype of what everyone thinks movie tie-ins are. It doesn’t even have the excuse of having to be rushed out, the movie it is based on came out 6 years prior. If someone was looking to provide the definitive Lion King experience in videogame form, they failed pretty spectacularly here.

That’s it for today. There are two Nintendo Directs in the next six days so I’m hopeful at least one has something Disney-related worth discussing. If not I’ve got a thing or two in mind to write about anyway so either way see ya real soon!