Disney's Cinderella: Magical Dreams

This is a simple side-scrolling platform game for the most part, with a few arcade levels featuring the Fairy Godmother shooting colored bubbles, and Cinderella and the Prince moving around the dance floor. In Cinderella’s levels, gamers will move Cinderella in side-scrolling environments which are outdoors in either farmyards, gardens or the woods. She has to avoid hazards which are in the guise of cute little critters, while she collects things like tiaras and flowers. Her levels are very simplistic, and mostly just involve avoiding the moving animals. For a change of pace, the Fairy Godmother shoots colored bubbles and then transforms ordinary items into the famous coach and horses ensemble from the movie. These levels are cute, as when she misses, she gets sprayed with water and uses her wand to scrape it off her clothes.

Gus and Jaq have the most complicated levels, and have to jump around on platforms as they avoid rolling objects, hot steam, and Lucifer. These are the most satisfying levels in the game, as they involve more critical thinking. Often, it’s not obvious how to get Gus and Jaq from one platform to another, and players have to plan their moves. The Prince and Cinderella have a lot of chemistry on the dance floor, but still need some help negotiating the latest dance moves.  Players will need to use the directional pad to match the correct direction as indicated on the screen for a cool dance move, while using the directional pad also to move the dancers and keep them in the spotlight, as it moves around the dance floor.

The levels are short and mostly easy, but offer good variety and interesting game-play for young children.  The differing levels all offer varying difficulty levels, as Cinderella’s action levels are much easier than Gus and Jaq. The Fairy Godmother and Cinderella’s dancing are arcade oriented, and fall somewhere in the middle in terms of difficulty.

However, there are a few design glitches which detract from the overall gaming experience. This game has a really bad collision detection system, and Cinderella and Gus and Jaq just can’t jump worth a hoot. In Cinderella’s and Gus and Jaq’s levels, they don’t have to actually touch the hazards to be hurt, they only have to stand close to them.  This becomes very annoying, as not only will these guys get hurt by getting close to objects, their bad jumping barely clears many objects, which means they get hurt most of the time they jump over things. It’s a shame that this type of sloppy programming prevents this game from being the really fun game it could have been.

Despite the bad controls, this is still a fairly decent game for young kids who have a high tolerance for frustration. For the easily frustrated, though, parents may want to avoid the possible meltdown from their children whose character has just expired, and so will have to start the level over again.

Gameplay: 6
The game-play potentially could have been very good, if it wasn’t for the clumsy design.  The bad collision is just bad programming, and should not have made it to the finished product. Cinderella and the mice don’t even have to actually touch the hazard, to get hit. Combine this with awkward jumping, and the levels’ fun factor quickly decreases.

Graphics: 7
The graphics are well done, and the movie clips are fun to watch.

Sound: 6
The sound is really strange, in that it doesn’t seem to be the same musical score from the movie (admittedly, it’s been a while since I’ve watched the movie).  It’s also not that good when considered separately from the movie Cinderella.

Difficulty: Easy/Medium
The game isn’t too difficult on the whole, but the bad jumping and collision detection makes it harder.

Concept: 6
It’s very similar to most “girl-games” for young children.  There is a good variety and challenge in some of the levels, but there should also have been a few mini-games for even more variety.  The presentation is not what it could have been, either.

Overall: 6
This could have been a very good game, but it just falls down in the execution. More time and effort should have been taken in the characters’ movement around the levels. As it is, this is just a mediocre game.