Disney's Atlantis: The Lost Empire

Like many older Disney titles, I'm a huge fan of the film this game is based on which makes this a huge disappointment for me given how it fails to live up to the standards of the film it's based on.

The game is very formulaic when it comes to 3d platformers based on Disney films, we have the standard collectathon of items (in this case, clear crystals which admittedly serve as the wumpa fruit from the crash bandicoot games that awards players a 1 up for every 100 collected) as well as letters of Atlantis scattered throughout each level. What separates this from other games is that there’s more than one protagonist to play as since you can choose between Milo, Kida, Audrey, Vinny and Moliere during certain parts of the game to complete the stages. This does allow the levels to be designed in a way where each of them is required for their unique abilities, however this is underutilised as the game wants Milo to be front and centre as often as possible with the side character conveniently being unavailable whenever the game wants him to shine. Aside from this gimmick, there's not much to talk about here, the enemies are pretty boring and only offer a challenge depending on which character faces them as they each have different weapons with varying degrees if power and usefulness to them. The graphics are piss weak here even compared to early ps1 games that were released nearly a decade prior, a huge disappointment considering how well animated the film remains to this day. It also borrows many assets from other popular games of the day, crash bandicoot, Spyro and tomb raider being three examples that immediately spring to mind for their collectathon gameplay, different gameplay styles and level design and lore respectively.

It's a very derivative game that's ultimately a decent distraction for Disney fanboys but is completely lacking for more hard-core gamers.