Boogie review (PlayStation 2)

As a concept, Boogie sounds like fantastic fun. ‘Singstar’ crossed with a rhythm action game; how could it go wrong? Well it did. Horribly!

Starting off with the most tedious tutorial I have ever encountered, Boogie never once managed to entertain either myself, or my young niece and nephew who I had invited around to partake in the review. As my eight year old nephew summed up so succinctly, ‘It should be called Poogie, not Boogie’. Kids eh, you’ve got to love ‘em!

I want you back, I want you back, Singstar I want you back for good

You’ve got to understand something about my nephew; he really does have a very high tolerance level. He even managed to extract enjoyment out of ‘The Muppets Party Cruise’ and ‘Donald Duck: PK’ games, so sub-mediocrity to him is a territory I don’t think he’s ever been in before. He loves games, he loves singing and you can’t stop him dancing at parties. How then did Boogie prompt such a damning response from him? Was it the lack of challenge, even for someone so young? Was it the overly simplistic ‘Singstar’ vocal part to the game? Was it the control system? Or was it the overall lack of presentation? It was all of those things, wrapped up in the most tepid excuse for a game that I have ever had the misfortune of having to review…and that’s saying something!

Boogie has clearly been developed for the younger audience in mind and that shows with the basic control system. Moving the left analogue stick up, down, left or right whilst pressing either circle, X or square in time with the on-screen beat indicator makes your ‘Boog’ perform a dance move. When you’ve performed enough moves and successfully filled up some of your ‘Boogie Meter’, there are some advanced moves you can perform, such as combos and striking different poses, which slowly deplete your ‘Boogie Meter’ and reward you with more points than standard moves. But because you’re always having to look at the on-screen meter to time your moves in order to maximise your score, you never get to see what your Boog is doing on-screen, which is something both younger players found frustrating. Even more bizarrely, the on-screen beat indicator never appears to reflect the beat of the music. Therefore you spend more time dancing to the pulsing meter, rather than to the actual beat of the song.

On the subject of the songs, Boogie boasts approx 40, featuring hits such as ‘Groove Is In the Heart’, ‘ABC’, ‘It’s Raining Men’, ‘We Are Family’ and ‘Kung Fu Fighting’. There are two problems with this track list though. The first being that the vast majority of the tracks are from the 70’s and 80’s, meaning that the target audience for Boogie will not have heard most of them before (and even if they’ve heard them, they’re unlikely to be their favourite songs). The second problem is that all of the tracks in Boogie are covers, and not good covers either. We’re talking early rounds of X-Factor here, which needless to say is as offensive to the ears as an hour of Catherine Tate.

In another attempt at spectacularly missing it’s target audience, EA decided to use static screens with reams of text, instead of animation and goofy humour for the cut-scenes during the story mode. If EA seriously wants to challenge in this market, it needs to understand it’s demographic first.

SOS (Rescue Me)…From this game

Apart from the story mode that requires you to both sing and dance, there are also separate ‘Dance’ and ‘Karaoke’ modes. There’s also a Party Mode that requires both competitors to dance on the screen at the same time. But as you’ll just be staring at the on-screen meter rather than either your character or your opponents, any fun is quickly lost.

There are a number of tokens that appear on-screen during your performance that you can collect. Ranging from score multipliers to reversing your opponents controls in party mode, none are particularly fun or indeed necessary to score the points required to collect a gold. It’s understandable that the game’s difficulty should be tailored for it’s audience, but the hard mode should still provide a challenge. Gold medals in hard mode can be achieved by simply button mashing and even the most difficult songs require no more than two to three attempts.

Finally in an attempt to please it’s younger audience, Boogie enables you to perform on-stage and then edit the video afterwards. After the initial burst of excitement (from my nephew it has to be said, my niece was somewhere downstairs at this point, already having given up), due to the uninteresting and limited dance moves and the lack of any fun or even useful editing options, this mode was quickly forgotten.

ABC…Easy as Boogie

With the lack of challenge, the absence of fun and no attempt at providing an experience for it’s target audience, EA has managed to produce one of the worst ‘games’ (if it can even be called that) that I have ever had the misfortune to play. It fails as both a rhythm-action game and as a kid’s game and I’m finding it hard to see who would be able to get more than half an hour’s enjoyment out of it. To not even be able to entertain a very easily pleased eight year old should provide enough of an indication as to how bad this really is. If not, the two-word summary from my niece should. ‘It sucks!’