Boogie is EA’s attempt to cash in on the singing and dancing sensations made so popular by DDR and SingStar. The concept is sound, the Wii’s motion sensing controllers make it the perfect console to support this kind of game, and with the addition of a Logitech microphone and EA’s history of always including excellent music in their games, it would seem like it would be hard to get wrong. Unfortunately, EA is up the challenge, and managed to completely ruin a perfectly feasible game concept.

Developer: EA (Montreal)
Genre: Rhythm, Singing, Dance
ESRB: E+ 10
Number of players: 1-4
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Release Date: October 14th, 2008

PASS

The game consists of two main types of game play, a singing mode and a dancing mode. The singing mode isn’t terrible, it has just been done before. The words are displayed at the bottom of the screen, and a series of bars on a musical scale show the timing and pitch of the song, which you have to match. It looks exactly the same as singstar, except that instead of watching a music video, you are seeing your character dance instead.

The dancing in the game is where it really starts to fail. In order to dance, you must wave your controller either up, down, left, and right, in time with the ‘beat’, which is defined as the little green light on the side of the screen flashing. This wouldn’t be so bad, if the beat matched the beat of the song, which it does… sometimes. More often then not, the beat is somewhat arbitrary. It can be slightly before, or after, the actual beat of the song, or completely unrelated if the song changes part way through. The game favors those who can ignore their sense of natural rhythm, rather than those who embrace it.

As well as singing in karaoke mode, or dancing in either single or multilayer mode, you can play through story mode with five different characters. This may have added some element of replayablity to the game if story mode wasn’t ridiculously easy. There are five stages for each character, two singing and three dancing, each having a progressively higher point score to beat. However, in the first levels of the game, it is possible to chat casually to your friends during the karaoke levels and still get more then enough points. Whether or not the dancing parts are easy depend on if you have mastered the ‘beat’ system or not.

The characters themselves are either cute, or creepy, depending on your point of view. Personally, although the fact that they all make noises instead of talking weirded me out at first, I kind of liked them. At any point in the game you could change which character you were playing for the mini games, and what clothes they were wearing. Clothes, as well as songs and stages, are unlocked either by playing story mode, or buy winning tokens in the individual song modes.

The selection of songs in the game is quite good. It contains a good mix of older party songs that everyone knows, and more recent songs that if you’ve been exposed to popular radio stations you can’t help but to know. The problem is that they have also chosen the 30 most repetitive songs they can find. Which this may help you learn the words more easily, it also means that you tire of the songs more easily – as in while you are singing them. Three minutes is an eternity when you are singing the same thing over and over again. The other thing worth noting is that the game doesn’t feature original songs, rather it has covers of them, and what’s more, they are PG-fied covers. No more going to the liquor store for the hero of mambo number five. It’s not a big problem, but it does leave some interesting pauses in some of the songs.

Overall, this game really isn’t worth it. EA would have been better off picking either singing or dancing, and making it good, then trying to combine them both, and failing at them both.