Disney’s Planes: Fire & Rescue Review

As an avid fan of video games and cinema, its common knowledge that movies based on our favourite gaming franchises are 98% guaranteed to suck ass and ruin what was once a spectacular tale for yourself, your friends and your innocent loved ones. Once upon a time these video game movies were considered the worst abomination upon this Earth, however within the past decade it’s gradually been overtaken by something more deadly, diabolical and crap, the video game spinoff, or to give its real name, ‘:The Official Videogame’. The ‘Wreck-It Ralph: Official Video Game’ was infamous for being 100% completable before the movie was finished if you were to watch it simultaneously, and who could forget the delightful Catwoman official video game, or even the magical realm to which ‘Bad Boys: Miami Takedown’ took place in. This category for gaming is an absolute stinker and unfortunately one that will continue to exist as long as gullible fans and naive children are still roaming the planet, and this latest turd to be flown in is arguably the worst I’ve come across.

Disney’s Planes: Fire & Rescue is ‘The Official Videogame’ for the summer movie of the same name, which follows the adventures of an oddball team of planes and helicopters as they strive to keep Piston Peak safe from forest fires. If you’ve seen the movie you’ll know this is literally all that happens in the movie and you’ll no doubt be glad that this also follows suit into its video game offspring which undeniably is just as boring. The game sees you control the whole Piston Peak Fire & Rescue team on an array of training exercises and missions, whether it’s putting out fires, moving boulders from one place to another, or rescuing disgruntled deer from their natural habitat and imprisoning them in your hangar. The training exercises are set up to show you, the player, how to control each character and aid you in how to put out fires, how to stop them from spreading and how to save friends and wildlife from danger. Though it sounds interesting I can assure you it isn’t as not only is each exercise relatively the same, but each character more or less does the same thing, leaving me confused as to why I simply must learn how to control each one. Each mission will only ever ask you to put out fires, or hoist a deer from the trees, which although I do understand is an act of fire and rescue, but what I don’t understand is to why it has to be so dull? Aside from these exercises, the game boasts an immersive story campaign, which unsurprisingly is just more of the same missions you’ve already carried out before hand, only now there’s added aircraft banter to get behind. Piston Peak may appear majestic, vast and wonderful in cinema but it is in fact drab, tiny and disappointing in game and unfortunately for us you never leave this land.

For those of you wondering what it would be like to really fly a rescue plane and extinguish forest fires, then I can tell you it will perhaps be easier to do than flying Dusty Crophopper around a fictional forest fires. You may laugh but the controls for this children’s game aren’t easy to pull off and you’ll be flying in the wrong direction more often than not. There appears to be confusion between the game and the 3DS joystick as you’ll swear you’re turning right but your plane thinks otherwise venturing to the left, thus wasting time putting out that fire and killing hundreds if not thousands of innocent squirrels. Armed with a limited supply of water or retardant, you must fly over each fire to put out the risk, however as simple as that sounds you have to do it with a certain degree of precision, as you’ll be convinced you’re directly on top of the threat, but you’ll waste your entire tank before realising you’ve missed it completely, then refilling will potentially cause you to fail. The game also lacks a mini map or at the very least a better threat indicator as chasing the wrong fire will also cause you to fail your objective. At the top of your screen you’ll see a number of bars gradually filling up to indicate how fierce each fire in the level are, however as you’re equipped with just a few arrows to point you in the right direction, you have no indication as to which fire poses the greatest threat, making it sometimes a difficult and frantic game of chance. ‘Little Orbit’ may like to promote that the game features 30 training missions and 12 unique fire and rescue missions, but that would be a much more impressive statement if the majority of the missions lasted longer than 2 minutes to complete. Measuring your success with a medal system, completing each task within an allocated time frame will earn you a gold, silver or bronze medal, which sounds rewarding but you’ll soon be whimpering for them to be much more worthwhile and lengthy, apart from the Fire & Rescue missions, where you’ll be whimpering for them to finish as quickly as possible.

I more than understand that this is a children’s game and that as a 24 year old I’m looking at this game entirely the wrong way, but I still play a large number of games from my childhood to this day, and they’re nowhere near as poor and dreary as this. I reflect back to some games I played on my GameBoy Colour when I was 10, spinoff games I owned from popular franchises like Inspector Gadget: Operation Madkactus was a very difficult, but hugely enjoyable game, likewise the official videogame for Babe: Pig In The City which, believe it or not, was a very challenging but terrific game to play. I work extensively with children so I only though it was fitting to lend my 3DS to one of the 6 year old kids I teach and it was returned to me a mere 10 minutes later, with reports of the game being, and I quote, “poo”; could it be that putting out forest fires just isn’t as exciting as we once thought. Sure the game is presented decently enough and it does feature characters, landmarks and talk topics explored in the movie, but these aren’t enough to redeem what is ultimately a major disappointment. Creating a game based from the most recent cinema blockbusters now just feels like a quick way to make a buck, and in an effort to release them whilst the film is relevant often means they’re piss poor and uncreative; it’s plane to see that this couldn’t apply any more here.

Disclaimer:All scores given within our reviews are based on the artist’s personal opinion; this should in no way impede your decision to purchase the game.