Main Street Mobile Arcade: Mad At Disney (Magic Kingdoms)
These days, Disney is more of a presence in the world of mobile gaming than it is in the more traditional console space. It makes a lot of sense on many levels. More young kids play games on phones or tablets, the risk is generally lower and it’s easy to make quick movie and TV show tie-ins. But to be fair a decent amount of Disney mobile games are also long-running affairs. Many mobile games come and go in less than a couple of years but I can find many Disney mobile games that have been going strong for five or more which in the mobile space is pretty rare.
Nevertheless, with all the disparate properties Disney owns, you never see much crossover in between the major entertainment divisions in these games. Disney is its own thing with Pixar and Muppets thrown in there, but Marvel and Star Wars and most other things Disney owns that might not be considered “core” Disney just have their own games and do their own thing. Goofy won’t be hanging out with Spider-Man in any games for example.
The one game that seems to have bucked that trend, even in a minor fashion, is Disney Magic Kingdoms. A mobile game where you free a theme park from evil magic by making Disney characters do tasks and build structures and rides. It’s not an exact copy of any particular Disney theme park, but it certainly gives you the closest experience you’ll get on a mobile device of running one (now why there has yet to be some sort of actual Disney theme park management sim I’ll never know, but that’s another post for another day), but more importantly, there have been and are Star Wars characters you can collect and have mingle with the more traditional Disney characters which also probably indicates that when Marvel characters are a regular feature at Disney parks they’ll likely be added to Disney Magic Kingdoms as well making this unique among Disney games as a whole and therefore kind of interesting.
Sounds like a pretty chill game right? Set your characters to do some tasks, wait, collect rewards and use those to unlock new buildings and characters. Unfortunately, the pace at which you can unlock things is insanely slow unless you are willing to pony up plenty of money for diamonds or quicker unlocks, and ultimately that is what kills any interest in Disney Magic Kingdoms for me. I played this game for about a month and a half before finally feeling like I had way too little to show for my time invested and I’ve given up.
I’ve played mobile games that have a similar premise such as Simpsons Tapped Out and while I did eventually get bored with those it had nothing to do with the resource/reward grind which I thought was handled much better. My main mobile game is currently Disney’s Sorceror’s Arena which admittedly is a super different game but still, one where pretty much every session I get new equipment, a level raise, a new character, some cool tangible reward. It should be roughly the same with Disney Magic Kingdoms. If unlocking characters takes a lot of resources then levels and/or attractions should unlock faster. I’m not even opposed to spending money on a mobile game as I have stated in previous entries but the amount I would need to spend to get anything worthwhile just doesn’t seem worth it.
So ultimately five years in, Disney Magic Kingdoms seems to be a cool idea weighed down by its resource mechanics which admittedly is the bane of many mobile titles. Maybe they fix that and I’ll get back into it but odds are I’m just permanently moving on to other things…
That’s all for today, see ya real soon!
