The new mobile game Disney Mirrorverse offers a pleasantly deep mobile RPG game with plenty of different game modes and options to keep players busy but suffers from aggressive sales tactics that constantly push players to purchase premium bundles and items even when they aren’t necessary. Published by Kabam, the maker of mobile hits like Marvel: Contest of Champions and Lord of the Rings: Legends of Middle-Earth, Disney Mirrorverse brings players into a divergent Disney multiverse in which classic characters like Mickey, Belle, and Maleficent are re-imagined as more powerful fighter-esque characters. Players will build a team of up to three characters and pit them against waves of enemies, all the while upgrading their characters with better abilities and powers and trying to dodge a never-ending barrage of pop-ups encouraging the players to spend money on a plethora of in-game items.
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The biggest draw of Disney Mirrorverse is the inventive way beloved Disney characters are reimagined as battle-tested warriors. Each design brings in aspects of an individual character’s stories and utilizes those aspects to give characters unique powers. For instance, Merida from Brave has a wisp-powered bow that creates a focus buff and powers her Bear Spirit special attack. Meanwhile, Sully is equipped with industrial-grade armor complete with a door shield that he uses to knock back enemies and protect teammates. Each character is placed into one of four character classes – Attack, Ranged, Support, or Tank – which determines their general stats. Players can slowly level up their characters through normal gameplay, or they can use XP motes (each of which are keyed to a different class) to quickly boost their powers. The designs are admittedly very cool and bring in characters from every corner of the Disney catalog. Popular characters like Buzz Lightyear and Mickey appear, but so do characters like Frank from Jungle Cruise (given a plant arm) and Tron from the Tron movies.
Disney Mirrorverse is a gacha game in which players collect crystals which generate random characters. Unlike most gacha games, in which players have a lower chance of collecting powerful characters, Disney Mirrorverse players have roughly the same odds to collect all 45 characters. However, most crystals will produce 1-star or 2-star versions of characters, which have lower stats, a lower level cap, and lacks access to special core abilities. By collecting duplicates of their Disney characters, players automatically upgrade their characters to have more stars, thus unlocking more abilities and making them more powerful automatically. It’s a novel take on the gacha format, one that should please those with a collector mentality but can frustrate those who can never get enough resources to upgrade their core characters to a higher star level.
The actual gameplay involves players controlling one character while battling waves of enemies. Players have three attacks – a quick attack that they use by tapping on their attack button, a slightly stronger charged attack (which occasionally has additional powers if their character is strong enough) that they use by holding down the attack button, and a special move that comes with a cooldown timer but has a variety of effects depending on the character. A player’s other characters operate independently, but players can still control when they use their respective special attacks. Players can also move their character around the stage via a control dial that’s pretty fiddly and not always responsive.
There are a handful of different game modes that keep players busy. The Story mode takes players through a rather generically-written quest to solve why the Disney Mirrorverse is under attack by “Fractured,” dark shadow versions of existing characters. Players can also choose to complete a rogue-like dungeon to collect buffs and items or events that offer limited-time currency and rewards, or Supply Runs to earn diamonds and XP motes. However, all of the various modes still involve the same combat-driven gameplay with very little variation outside of which boss character you end up facing. It gets monotonous in a hurry, which is why the “Autoplay” feature is unlocked pretty quickly into the story.
The other major issue with Disney Mirrorverse is its aggressive monetization scheme. Disney Mirrorverse is a free to play game, but players will be constantly faced with pop-up menus encouraging them to spend money. The pop-ups occur everywhere – in between levels, when switching between screens, and when looking through notifications. I understand that free-to-play games need to make their money too, but the system makes it seem like players HAVE to buy these items if they want to make real progress, which just isn’t true.
If Kabam can figure out how to tone down their constant asks for money and also provide players with more variation in actual gameplay, they may have a hit on their hands with Disney Mirrorverse. The characters are certainly cool and I’d love to see the world expand to include more stories over time. However, because of the constant barrage of in-game ads, I certainly wouldn’t recommend this game to kids, despite its use of beloved characters.
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
A beta version of Disney Mirrorverse was provided for review along with a number of premium items designed to help the reviewer quickly progress into the mid-game.
