Rush: A Disney Pixar Adventure Review
Five years after its initial release, Rush – A Disney – Pixar Adventure, has been remastered in shinny 4K and released on the Xbox One, with controller support added, to allow the game to continue on, especially now that the Kinect is officially done. But I can’t help feel that with the brand new Xbox One X console lacking many exclusives and there not being too many games aimed at a younger audience, this remastered re-release feels like a way to bulk out the Xbox One X catalog.
Rush sees you play a boy or a girl, who run around a “Pixar Park” hub world, meeting and making friends, using their imagination to continue stories from the worlds of Pixar, Toy Story, Ratatouille, Cars, Up, The Incredibles and Finding Dory.
The game follows a “endless runner” style, with your character constantly moving forward, either running, driving, canoeing, gliding, flying etc. I’ve enjoyed this style of gameplay before, in games like Tron Run/R or many mobile games, but Rush really has some amazing visuals and captures the fun aspect of Pixar movies.
Since this was originally a Kinect game, motion control is still an option and I’m sure smaller players will still enjoy jumping around, moving left to right, but being able to play with a controller, does give better control and makes it much easier than using the older system. This is why the “endless runner” movement makes more sense, since originally this was needed to keep the game going, though with controller support, it feels less important.
One quick note about the Finding Dory area, this is the one area which did get a little a few new missions with the remaster, to represent the newest movie from Pixar. Again it looks beautiful and is a lot of fun, but its a shame more of this content wasn’t added to bulk out the game into a bigger title and I’m not sure if these additional levels are enough to warrant a repurchase for original players.
I enjoyed the Cars levels, it suits the constantly moving forward format and while it’s not as enjoyable as the recent Cars 3: Driven To Win game, it gives a nice little racing action to the game and stood out compared to the other worlds, which often used a similar format.
The Incredibles World was also plenty of fun as they incorporated the format well, sliding down ice with Mr Incredible and Frozone, while throwing blocks around and battling the Droids also felt totally at home with the controls.
Ratatouille was a lot of fun and is easily the best video game version of the franchise, I loved the boss battles and how they incorporated the human characters into the game, giving a great representation of them being huge from the Rats point of view, which reminded me a little of the attraction in Disneyland Paris.
The levels based on Up, felt a little odd, such as seeing Carl running along side me, hearing the dogs but not really getting to engage with them and especially with the audio sounding much more repetitive than from other worlds.
My least favourite world was the Toy Story Levels, which felt very repetitive to what I’d already played in Ratatouille, Incredibles and Up worlds. Maybe it was just controlling a generic robot and getting stuck trying to open a box with a skipping rope. It felt like the Toy Story world felt too forced to fit the constantly moving forward system and it didn’t work.
Rush is a beautiful game, for a game that is 5 years old, it jumps out as being bright, colorful and just fun to play. However I played through all of the episodes within two hours, there is some replay value if you want to get a gold rating and find all the hidden areas, but I’m not sure it will keep attentions to long, which is one of the reasons why I think this game was re-released at a budget price.
Overall:
For younger players, this is a great game to add to their collection, its easy to control and they get to play as characters from 6 different Pixar movies. It’s a budget release and worthwhile looking at, especially since the target audience would have been too young to play or didn’t exist when this game was released originally, so there is a whole new audience but it’s still a last generation game and I’m not sure children will notice the 4K difference.
Review Score: 6. OK