Disney’s Big Hero 6 is an action-packed movie with a surprisingly casual game

Big Hero 6: Bot Fight, the official game of the upcoming Disney movie, is out today. Last week we lamented that the game looks too casual for the action-packed universe it’s based on – but it turns out there are good reasons why that’s the case.

“We wanted the game to be accessible to casual players,” says Dennis Wan, producer at Gumi Asia, which developed the game for Disney. “What’s more accessible than a match-three game?”

A screen capture of Big Hero 6: Bot Fight.

Studio manager Cash Ong, who also had a hand in the game, says that Disney approached the company for a co-development deal on the Big Hero 6 game due to Gumi Asia’s experience. He explains that movie tie-ups on games typically aren’t long-lived, but Disney wants the Big Hero 6 game to go on for as long as possible. Disney was also impressed with Gumi Asia’s experience with Brave Frontier and its money-making gachapon feature. (Disclosure: We were invited to the game preview and got an early movie screening free of charge.)

Big Hero 6: Bot Fight expands on the game’s movie universe by creating robots for players to do battle with. These robots were conceptualized and brought to life in-house at Gumi Asia, with Disney’s approval. Gumi Asia had just four months to develop the game, and this was done with 20 to 30 people on the project at any one time.

Yet there’s a lot more to the Big Hero 6 universe than just robots. San Fransokyo – the city it’s set in – is a sprawling Tokyo-USA hybrid metropolis and the future of technology is deeply embedded in there. The movie features lots of action scenes involving flying through a city, dodging floating propellers, and even rollerblading along pipes while on the run from the story’s nemesis. The similarly action-packed official Transformers: Age of Extinction game featured an epic run-and-gun adventure where Bumblebee could blast or run over oncoming enemies. That’s why it’s so surprising that the Big Hero 6 game is such a sedate puzzler.

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Ong explains that if given the chance to create a game without regard for Disney audiences, he wouldn’t have changed anything about Big Hero 6: Bot Fight except to make all its robot models 3D. Currently, only the main characters of the game are in 3D.

“This game is what we wanted to build,” Ong says. With Puzzle Trooper, the studio’s first puzzle game, only mid to hardcore players stayed on. Casual puzzle game players found it difficult to play. “We realized Big Hero 6 would be the perfect tie-up for casual players,” Ong claims.

If you’re a casual player in Asia and just can’t wait to play this game, you’ll be thrilled to know that Big Hero 6: Bot Fight will come out in Southeast Asian territories the same time it will in the US. Gumi Asia will be publishing the game for this region, with Disney Interactive handling the rights for the rest of the world.

We’ll update with the app store links to the game when they go live.

You can now download the game on iOS, Android, or Windows Phone.