Disney's Mulan

Mulan is based on the animated film from Disney. Mulan's father has been conscripted into the imperial army, but he is old and frail so Mulan decides to protect him by pretending to be his son, and joins the army in his place. As usual with these plots it's a case of one man, or woman, making all the difference as to whether the war is won or not.

Mulan is another platform style game, although as usual with this sort of game there are various other sections, to make things more interesting. The first thing I noticed about this game was the low quality of the graphics. This isn't a Game Boy Color game, so you just get the usual 4 colour graphics, but even ignoring this the graphics are still pretty terrible! The next thing I noticed was that the music was rather poor, so I decided it was better to turn it off and play the game in silence instead. This would be forgivable if the game itself was more interesting, but it's just an ordinary platform game which doesn't really bring anything new to the genre. The control system is fairly poor with both run and fire being assigned to the same button meaning you can't fire unless you're standing still, which means the game loses a lot of fluidity. Also when you do a running jump the animation looks wrong. Mulan runs, then stops, and then jumps as if doing an ordinary jump, which is rather confusing - especially being as the game is full of jumps which can only be completed this way.

Each stage of the game is slightly different, although in actual fact they still all have a similar feel to them. Stage-1 sees you trying to complete an army training course. This involves throwing rocks at boards, and then trying to run across before they pop up again - (over and over again). There are also some green puddles to jump, if you fall in then you drown. Which is rather bizarre considering that in Stage-2 you are swimming down a vertically scrolling river trying to avoid your true identity being revealed. On stage-3 you are trying to save Shang from being engulfed in snow. This is a sideways scrolling section in which you skate along trying to dodge various obstacles.

Stage-4 is another platform game section in which you get to go underground. There are 10 such stages in total, but I was forced to stop playing at this point as my brain started to melt. The game is quite difficult, (in my opinion too difficult) with some hard jumps, and some quite tricky timing required, although it's largely made this hard by the 'not quite right' controls.