Boogie Review

BY Nicholas Rego | POSTED: 06 December 2007

Even tone-deaf gamers can win here.



The Nintendo Wii was heralded  as the next leader in the gaming market, thanks to its sleek design and innovative control schemes. Before long, the Wii became a great family-friendly console, and the slew of games that followed was mind-boggling. And what better family-fun game is there than karaoke? In Boogie for the Wii, players get to sing or dance to some great songs and rack up points. Sadly for the game, it fails to deliver on nearly all levels of gameplay, thus quickly becoming as interesting as watching paint dry.

The game lets you  control one of five characters called ‘Boogs’ (more like boogers) which dance along on screen in time to the music. The game has a very transparent story mode for each Boog, but there is not point in playing this mode as it acts out like it was written by a 9 year old.  If you do manage to crawl through the five levels for each character, you can unlock further tracks and accessories for your Boog.

Getting down to the gameplay itself, the game uses a fairly simple tutorial to tell you what to do. You can use the analog stick or D-pad to move your character around on screen, while waving the remote in a particular direction performs a specific dance move. The game is quick to remind you that repeating certain moves too often will not net you much points, so its crucial that you keep your dancing moves fresh. As you continue to get your groove on, a ‘groove bar’ fills up, and once it’s full, you can activate it to enter a DDR-style arrow scheme, where you shake the controller to match on-screen directions. Get all the moves right and your character will pull off a special dance move which will nab you a lot more points. But although this sounds terribly exciting, the game will pass off any gesture as a successful dance move. You could be sitting on your couch swatting flies and you’d still rack up some good points. There isn’t really an in-game mechanic to see if you’re waving the remote in the right direction or not, so after a while you really lose the will to put any effort into the game. If you plug in the Nunchuck controller, you get to ‘strike a pose’ in certain parts of the game, but this too is highly over-rated.

To accompany the erratic ‘dancing’, Boogie comes bundled with a microphone, which of course means that you have to sing during certain game chapters. The game checks your pitch and tone as you sing, and scores you accordingly. But this portion of the game also fails to impress – during one song I just kept humming loudly, and managed to score maximum points, so clearly accuracy is not the game’s strongpoint. Though there are a fair number of good songs to croon to, the fact that the game doesn’t care if you can sing or not takes all the fun out of the karaoke mode. You also can’t score points by dancing while you’re singing -  although you can move the controller to make your character move, you’re only scored on your vocals during the karaoke mode, which is another let-down.

Graphically, the game does a half-decent job. Characters and levels are animated well, and look vivid on-screen. The visuals during some of the extended dance sessions are also pulled off nicely, so even if the game bombs, it is still pretty to look at. The track list is fairly enjoyable, containing artists such as Fergie, Jennifer Lopez, Culture Club, and Daft Punk, so there’s a good mix of recent and old songs. The game also allows you to make your own music video with a fairly straightforward editing module, so you can fine-tune your performance and replay it later.

Boogie could have been an absolute hit for the Wii, as the idea to offer a dance and karaoke game to players would have surely caught on. Sadly, the feeble story mode will drive you nuts, while you’ll probably pass the dancing phase by attaching your remote to a ceiling fan. This is clearly a game aimed at younger players, as anyone older will get about 4 minutes worth of gameplay out of this game.