It’s that time again! Time to review a perfectly good excuse to waste 5 hours on and getting some cheevos in the meantime. Let me start by saying that I’ve never seen any episode, upcoming movie, video/dvd or anything of the Disney Hannah Montana show. I do know Miley Cyrus though, she even sent me a cute picture of her mug to tempt me into giving this an 11/10.


Nice try Miley, but no tits or vagoo means gtfo you old hag!

Since this is the game of the movie, I figured I would check it out and get an easy 1000/1000 in the meantime. I didn’t expect what I would find...

The game is broken up into parts where you play Miley… Something who is actually secret superstar Hannah Montana. Her dad keeps her true identity a secret, in order for her not to become yet another superficial slutty drunk ass holier-than-thou L.A. bitch. Which didn’t work out too well in RL, but hey it’s still a fantasy world eh? For the game, this means that you spend 90% of the game as Miley in Tennessee, which is way more Southern than I thought it was, and the remaining 10% as Hannah Montana playing some songs from the movie in Performance Mode.

While the Miley stuff isn’t too bad for a tween girl game, it’s not exactly very hard either. Basic adventuring in the style of: ‘follow this arrow to an objective and press the big green A button’ is the key design element for traversing the world. A couple of minigames are available for your leisure. Things like riding your horse Blue Jeans over one track (do it 10x for an achievement), while Miley exclaims “Come on Blue Jeans!” which sounded to me and a mate as “Come on Boobies!”

Another set of minigames are available at the country fair, which can range from annoying to ridiculous. In Frog Hop, you move the LS up and then down to launch a frog to land on a couple of rotating platforms that are rotating around some center axis. The closer to the center a platform is, the more points it is worth. In Ball Throw, you have 5 bag balls to throw a set number of tin milk cans or bottles with. Actually, this game has the best milk bottle physics ever seen in a game. They are really a sight to behold, as you throw your ball with grace after first fondling it a little with your 16 year old fingers, only to then see the results of shooting your ball load into a group of empty bottles who then fall all over the place in a realistic way. Yumm! However, to get the cheevo for this minigame, you have to pass all ten levels which is actually not thaaaat easy. It’s hard to see where exactly your throw till go, and since you throw by flicking the RS down and then up, it sometimes won’t register the upwards movement very well and make your balls drop their load’s momentum too soon. And Miley doesn’t like premature ball failing :(



The final minigame is a Horse Race carnival game. Here you have 4 lanes with flat horses on a stick, that can go faster by shooting the right target. The key is to find the target that has the highest multiplier (1x – 5x) and then shoot that as much as possible. If you shoot the wrong target, another horse will benefit and go faster. However, the game does not explain this at all and I never played such a game in my life. Suffice to say that after retrying it 15x I started to hate this game. Worst of all, it’s apparently possible to multiplay this game by connecting 4 controllers. After winning a game with 4 controllers, you get a cheevo. Not after playing the game 1,5 hours straight and trying to think of ways to get the cheevo by winning in different ways…. Oh well.

From time to time, going through the story will let Miley get some creative ideas. For instance, when she finds a safari outfit she will dream away of a concert with a safari theme. This will cue 2 songs you will have to play through in succession.


Dude It’s a safari themed Llama! So disappointed that the original vid wasn’t on youtube..

Now, these performance levels are partly horrible and at the same time strangely compelling. You see, you have to do a number of minigames during the song that kinda switch around on the fly. You can use the dual analog sticks to strike a pose; holding both sticks upwards does a raised-arms pose while moving the LS downleft and the RS left will do a one-arm-down-one-arm-on-your-hips pose. The same system was done in High School Musical 3 on the Wii where you had to strike that pose with the wiimote and nunchuck, and I bet it was done the same way on the 360 as it was done here.

Another section requires you to do a whole lot of short and fast moves with the sticks, rather than holding any direction. The problem is that there are around 10-15 moves that only get explained in one subsection of a tutorial. So while you are busy not paying attention, you’ll probably forget at least half of the right moves. Not that it matters much, because you can just flick the sticks in any direction until you have found the right one. Still, it is actually pretty fun to do once you get the hang of it, mostly because you have to react pretty fast and have to remember a lot of moves without any on-screen cues other than an icon saying “do the cowgirl rope swinging move!”

Then there are the vocal sections where you have to either press the A button (indicated by a blue colored circle) or hold the B button (a yellow circle with a bar next to it) in an EBA/Ouendan way of gameplay. It’s not quite EBA, but it works remarkably well in such a game. Finally there are guitar and drum sections. Guitar is done by press A to strum, and moving the LS up and down for notes that are above or below the middle snare. Pretty easy, but still fun to play and actually weird to see them depart from the tried and trusted Guitar Hero formula. The drums work by having the LS left and up for the left two drum pads, and the RS up and right for the right two drum pads. Notes fall down, you have to move into the right direction at the right time.


Not quite..

All in all, the Singing, Guitar and Drum gameplay works pretty well and is actually fun to do. Which is really weird, because games like this are supposed to suck. In a way, it still sucks because A) the songs could be considered as horrible and B) you hear lame “good”, “fail” or “perfect” sound effects for every note you play or miss. Of course, this interferes with the great soundtrack that Disney provided for this game. Especially when playing the drums, you just hear “POOM” whenever you hit a note correctly.


I wonder what she does with those two fi… never mind

Because the core gameplay elements have some promise, I can see devs expanding on this in future games in the genre. I think it’s possible to translate a lot of the Wii movement stuff with the dual analog sticks as long as you explain the moves properly and design it well. Likewise, the 360 controller (and PS3 controller of course) seems to allow for EBA kind of games that are normally reserved for the DS. The game shows a lot of hidden potential under its layers of tweendom kiddieness, but I hope that potential will be worked on for future games. They will probably still be casual games, but more rhythm games on the tv are never a bad thing.

Minigames and performances in (dream)concerts give you coins that you can use to buy clothing, shoes, wristbands and jewelry. One coin equals one piece of clothing, just like it is in real life! Everytime you select one in a store, Miley will say “Sweet ….!” So in a pants store she will say “Sweet pants!” when they are VERY TINY PANTS, and in the shirt store she will say “Sweet shirt!” when you found some ultra slutty shirt to go along with her tiny pants and high heel slutshoes. What is best about all this is that you will find yourself buying as many clothes as possible for the ‘100 clothing bought’ achievement, but in the meantime you will lol about all the slutty clothing that Miley looks hot in. Even though her face looks normal and the rest of her body looks completely anorexic…


I wonder what she does with that tongu... wait why the hell are you still reading this?

Overall, this game wasn’t toooo bad. I’ve played worse games, and this game is right up there with Barbie Horse Adventures on the xbox1 as one of the better tween adventure games. There is a good balance between adventuring/walking around, and you move from location to location enough to not get bored with any one location. Because you can choose when to ride Blue Jeans/Bewbies, it doesn’t feel like too much of a chore. Plus you get 50gs for doing it 10x… doing the minigame, not Miley (which is a legal 16gs). The fairground minigames can be a bit frustrating when you have to figure out what to do exactly, or when you just fail at it. But the performance sections are fun enough to play, and there is enough to do in the 4 hours that the game lasts, that you won’t really get bored any time soon.

Negative points are the fact that the game tells you that:
- Everything pretty much comes for free for the rich and famous, even if they are undercover.
- Tennesse is a backwards place where everyone is innocent and people still live the southern comfort style everywhere. Oh and people live on farms and wear farm clothes.
- Economic development is evil, and must be stopped by holding County Fairs or something, ending in using a popstar to raise money to stall said development and keep away the specter of progress
- All girls are thin. What?
- Snobby bitches will OMG! tell you about a new store you totally haaave to go to. What happened to the hate on economic development and wearing farm clothes?
- Miley is a bitch to her brother, who will one day return the favor by throwing pig blood over her at her during her prom queen acceptance speech. Go bro!
- It’s not very hard, or long. Unlike what’s in my pants when I was playing dressup with Miley? Ehm, disregard that last part.
- One you reach the last stage or are near it, you can't teleport anywhere using y our Z-phone which means you can't make money or buy other clothes. This will cost you the 100gs clothing achievement if you were foolish enough to buy shoes and jewelry and not actual clothes!!!

The weirdest part about this game is that I started and finished it after finishing The Godfather II. After GF2, I really wanted to watch that movie again. But after Hannah Montana: The Movie: The Game, I wanted to see the Hannah Montana movie even more! That is an amazing achievement by itself and I applaud the game for that. Going in with 0 knowledge about the show, I finished the game kinda understanding why 12 year old girls get wet panties for Miley Cyrus. I still don’t get the Jonas Brothers though, are they non-heterosexual like that Twilight dude or something?


Distracting you from the score!

Verdict: 6.0/10

Not a bad game for your kids and laughably playable enough for achievement whores. This kiddie game offers the Beeeeeeeest of Boooooth Worlds!




OMG WHAT A FATTY!

<3