Probably Epic Mickey: Power of Illusion. Amazing idea to bring back the 2D Mickey style, game looks and plays like garbage.
Yep. The demo was already an indication of what was in store, but I figured "Well, I'm getting this for $30, and this is coming from the Henry Hatsworth guys. Surely it can't get much worse than this, right?"
Whoo boy, did I make a wrong call there.
Mickey controls sluggishly. The intro is way too long. The painting mechanic completely stops the flow of the game. There's some platforming, yeah. But in between it, you'll frequently have to stop, trace the same damned shape on the touchscreen, and continue on, which gets
very annoying,
very quick. It pretty much never gets used in any sort of meaningful or clever way, and honestly only seems like it's there because it's an Epic Mickey game, and the paintbrush is the whole point of EM. And even when you factor in the painting and the fortress aspect, and the insultingly easy fetch quests, I still managed to beat the game in a little over two hours.
Admittedly, the production values are quite nice. The sprite work is pretty cool, and the music (Specifically the tracks arranged from the original Castle of Illusion game) is pretty nice. I was really excited about having a spiritual sequel to one of my favorite platforming series done by what seems like a competent developer, but Dreamrift
really screwed up here. It's a shame, because Hatsworth is one of my favorite DS games. The fact that Dreamrift was working on this was why I even had confidence in this in the first place.
Runner up:
New Super Mario Bros. 2
Found the game to be thoroughly boring the whole way through.