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Boogie Review
8 out of 15
Boogie’s slick presentation can’t make up for its lackluster gameplay.
Date: Monday, September 10, 2007
Author: Brandon Cackowski-Schnell

Boogie’s multiplayer modes consists of dance offs where two dancers compete against one another for the highest score. The same dance rules apply as with the single player mode only now you can pick up power ups that either give your dancer more boost, or causes your opponent’s dancer to freeze or have their controller motions reversed. As these powerups are collected by moving your dancer via the thumbstick, they rarely get used because of the difficulty in moving your dancer around. Sadly, there’s no support for multiplayer Karaoke, so no sing-offs and no ability to sing both parts of duets.

The game's story mode allows you to peer into the life of Boogie’s characters and take them on a singing and dancing romp through the ages. The story is told through barely animated cut-scenes and dialog screens (no voice acting here) and makes the story mode of most fighting games seem like Shakespeare. Completing the story mode unlocks more songs for Karaoke and dancing, as well as accessories for character customization. Additionally, players can win tokens to purchase additional unlockables. While the story mode is a fast way to unlock more items (each story takes about 20 minutes to unlock), playing Boogie alone is a quick way to make yourself feel like an idiot.

Finally, the game offers a video creation mode with some pretty slick editing tools. Players can sing or dance to a song, then create a video of their performance complete with edits, various effects and four different camera angles. The videos can be fun to watch, especially when they showcase a particularly awful singing performance, however there’s no way to share them once you’ve created them. This kind of feature begs for integration with the Wii’s built in Wi-Fi connection, either through the ability to send movies to other Wii owners, or the ability to upload them to the Web. As is stands now, it’s fun to watch the video you’ve just created, but not so much that you’d have people over just to watch your Boogie videos.

It’s a shame that Boogie’s gameplay falls so flat because there’s a tremendous amount of potential here. EA has shown it can not only make an original property, but put the proper resources behind it to make it slick and approachable. If only they had put as many resources behind making the gameplay as deep as it is eye catching, they’d really have something here. As it stands now though, Boogie is worth a rental and nothing more, as you won’t get more than an hour or two of fun out of it before you decide to go back to singing in the shower.

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