If you can’t wait to watch Disney’s upcoming Big Hero 6 movie (set to hit theaters in the US on November 7) you can get a sneak peek of the action with the Big Hero 6 Bot Fight mobile tie-in game, set a year after the events of the movie.
Made by Gumi Asia, a Singapore-based gaming studio, the game was developed in six months and features the characters from the upcoming movie. Gumi is well known for publishing mobile RPG Brave Frontier, and Bot Fight shares some of the gameplay that made Brave Frontier addictive.
Cash Ong, studio manager at Gumi, told CNET that the studio chose the match-three mechanics (popularized by Bejewelled) as it was easy for casual gamers to pick up. While the gameplay is simple, Gumi has included ‘star objectives’ — finishing stages in a certain number of turns, or dealing a certain amount of damage, for example — to the game’s levels to make it harder for those who want a challenge.
The Singapore studio has a year of content updates planned to keep the game going. Gumi has a co-development deal with Disney — it will handle publishing duties in Asia while Disney Interactive will publish for the rest of the world.
I gave the game a quick hands-on, and if you’ve played Fat Princess: Piece of Cake or Bejewelled you’ll have no issues jumping straight into the game. If you’ve played other match-three collecting games like Tower of Saviors or Puzzle and Dragons, you’ll find the character unlocking mechanics familiar, too.
In-app purchases take the form of Prisms, which are used to obtain the rarer characters in the game. You can also earn the premium currency in-game by completing star objectives, or as rewards for logging in daily.
Big Hero 6 Bot Fight will be available on iOS and Android, and users in the US will get a Windows Phone version as well. Check out the gameplay trailer below.