Game Review: Phineas and Ferb Across the 2nd Dimension for Wii

Phineas and Ferb Across the 2nd Dimension
Disney Interactive Studios
Rate: E10+

Phineas and Ferb have been a part of our household fairly steadily for the past few years and as my girls get older (they’re 11 & 9), they seem to like them more and more. The characters are as quirky as they get and how can you not love Perry, the teal platypus?

Photo: Disneygo.com

The Wii game, Phineas and Ferb Across the 2nd Dimension – is based on the Disney Channel Original Movie with the same title. Players choose the character they want to be as they start their adventure battle everything from purple and green gelatin monsters to flying robots. Each character has a favorite weapon and a special ability. You can fly, jump, flip and run through obstacle courses, moving platforms and fly down giant slides as you make your way through a variety of levels while you’re in search of gadgets, tokens, and components, all while battling the bad guys. Once you make it past a level, you have the option of using the tokens you earn to play arcade games like the crane game and skeeball. The crane game allows you to collect figurines, additional tokens or tickets. With skeeball, you can collect tickets only. You trade the tickets in to win additional components for the gadgets you have.

Photo: Disneygo.com

One of our favorite parts was when you found blueprints and had to find the components to build different objects including an awesome “platypult” that launched Phineas and Ferb through the sky.

Positive Features:
• Fantastic visuals and characters that are very accurate to the storyline (and just as likeable!).
• Once you understand how to maneuver the characters, it’s pretty easy to move them around from screen to screen.
• When you shoot at the monsters, you always seem to hit them.
• You can switch gadgets mid-play to have different firing power.
• Excellent for younger set who want to play a bigger-kid style game.

Negative Features:
• The two-player mode is hard because the players have to cooperate to be able to move forward in the game. If one player doesn’t want to follow the other player, you’re stuck.
• Trial and error for how move between levels because there are a lot of arrows pointing you around.
• Levels seem fairly simple, just with different backgrounds – purple bad guys, green bad guys, little robot bad guys, flying bad guys…you just keep shooting them.

All in all, my girls were very entertained playing Phineas and Ferb Across the 2nd Dimension – definitely more when they played 1 player game, than trying the 2-player version. They loved the blueprints and gave two thumbs up to the arcade games (even though there were only two that we found, they really liked them a lot!). Eleven year old gave 3 ¾ starts out of 5 – “it’s frustrating because you don’t know which way the arrows are telling you to go, there are too many with different colors and shapes.” Nine year old gave it 4 ½ stars out of 5 – “it’s fun to play against the bad guys because they come out of nowhere all of a sudden and I really like that.” Me – I had fun playing the game – it was fairly easy for me to get around, I never seemed to run out of life, and I thought it was pretty funny to shake the remote to escape from gelatin. I didn’t master the mid-play switching of the gadgets, but I’m sure if I gave it another go, I’d be able to figure it all out.

– Erin

* We did not receive monetary compensation for this review. That’s IT Mommy received Phineas and Ferb Across the 2nd Dimension from Disney Interactive Studios free of charge to facilitate this review.  The review is in our own words and is our opinion. Your results and opinions may differ.