Boogie is all about the music. Without a good selection of songs to sing and dance to, the game would fall apart. Luckily, the track list that’s featured here covers a couple of decade’s worth of cheesy pop songs, including everything from Kung-Fu Fighting by Carl Douglas all the way up to more recent releases such as Don’t Cha by the Pussycat Dolls. A total of 35 tracks are featured, and while there are some hits and misses, there should be some familiar party songs for everybody to enjoy. There is a story mode in the game, but it’s fairly uninteresting, and players are more likely going to pick the songs they want to sing from the menu and get straight into the gameplay.
The song selection is varied, as are the characters!
When playing the game, you have a choice. You can either use the Wii remote to ‘dance’ to what you see on screen, or you can select to plug in the included microphone and belt out the song of your choice at the top of your lungs. Unfortunately, EA has made the decision to separate the two elements, so that you can’t actually combine the dancing and the singing at the same time. Maybe they felt that players simply aren’t that coordinated, but it’s a shame that the option isn’t there for those that would like to combine the singing with the dancing. You can shake the Wii-mote as you sing to make your character dance, but there are no points rewarded for doing so, which renders it a tad pointless.
So let’s hope that the two separate gaming mechanics in Boogie actually work well in practice. While the idea is certainly there, it seems like the actual gameplay hasn’t been tweaked enough to properly take advantage of the different elements of singing and dancing. To be successful with the dancing part of the game, all it involves is moving the Wii remote up, down, left and right to the beat of the songs. If you are successful, you can fill up your boost bar which then sends DDR-style arrows up the side of the screen which you can then match to your movement of the Wii remote for bonus points. This part of the dance sequences is always the stand-out and works well, but even then it's still somewhat easy to rack up those points.
A problem here with the dancing part of the game, is that instinctively you’re going to want to shake the Wii remote to the beat of the song. But accompanying the songs in Boogie is a metronome that you can hear coming from the Wii remote itself. Sometimes you’ll be dancing to the beat of the song, but the metronome will be following a completely different beat altogether, which means that you’ll lose points. Trying to dance to the beat of the metronome rather than listening much to the actual song being played doesn’t feel natural in certain songs.
Get your boogie on... in space? Sure, why not...
For those not into the dancing, in the singing element the game matches your tone to the music being played and gives you points based on how well you sing. It works on a basic level, but is very forgiving, not requiring you to sing the right words if you don’t want to. As long as you stay in tune, even if you just hum the tune, it will give you points as if you’re singing correctly. In fact, both the singing and dancing elements of the game are very forgiving, allowing you to do almost anything you like and still receive a decent score at the end.
The best thing about Boogie is the way it looks. There are a lot of different backgrounds and locations that all look rather impressive and polished, and the characters in the game are equally as nice to look at as well as being zany and unique at the same time. The animation is also very interesting to watch and is always fluid. It has a very appealing style to it, and a lot of effort has been taken to make sure that the Wii has been used properly to create a graphical experience that stands out comparatively to some of its other titles. It’s also worth noting that Boogie runs in both 16:9 widescreen and progressive-scan.
Mmm... Shiny.
The sound in the game is of good quality, considering that the songs are covers, most have solid audio. Boogie also boasts a video editor, which allows you to edit the effects seen on screen and change camera angles, among other things, to make your song and dance routines a bit more personal. Although this does add some longevity to the title, there isn’t much benefit in playing through the songs multiple times except for the possibility of getting a higher score. The gameplay gets old very fast, though it should be said that Boogie is something that anybody can play and enjoy without any real skill involved, so casual gamers may find the experience more tolerable.
If EA is going to continue Boogie as a franchise, the gameplay could definitely use a tune-up. Shaking the Wii remote to the beat might be fun at first, but it wears thin given how easy it is to get points. The karaoke element of the game is equally shallow and is also overly forgiving, and the fact that you can’t combine the two functions together is a shame, as that may have made the two modes a little more difficult to master. Boogie looks fantastic, but this is a serious case of style over substance, and it’s difficult to recommend a game that is so utterly simplistic when there are better alternatives out there.
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