Boogie for the DS is a game which takes the new popularity of rhythm gaming in the West, slaps a layer of crude westernised cartoon style on top and covers it in a mass amount of sugary alienation for the icing. Not only is it almost impossible to know how to play Boogie but it also just doesn’t feel rewarding enough to bother.

The games narrative (what little of it there is) takes place on a far off planet, its inhabitants who seem to make it their mission to dance along to badly sung cover versions of popular music from Earth, are actually bright and colourful beings with many changeable appearances. In the DS version you are able to choose from five different characters who you will take to ultimate stardom and progress to become the dancing queen (or king) of Boogland.

Rather than in the Wii version where you get the choice of singing or dancing, on the DS you can only dance your way to digital success. With your trusty stylus in hand you hit the dance floor and immediately hit a snag. Unlike in other rhythm games, Boogie doesn’t actually tell you what to do in time to the music, giving you complete freedom to express your inner dancing spirit, or just have your character stand there like that awkward friend who is always too shy to dance to the music with other people around. It was nice to get caught off guard like that having expected to be hit with my beloved oncoming arrows/glowing orbs or looming circle beats a la Osu Tatakae Ouendan but instead had to express my creativity through dance, which actually turned out to be quite the challenge.

The game alienates you immediately by giving you free reign over your actions but fails to give any more guidance than ‘Move in time to the beat’ which is actually quite difficult to do when you’re sitting on the bus or in a loud room so you go into random stroke territory, which thanks to the games simple difficulty, actually turns out quite well for you. When you realize that it’s impossible to do organized play when there isn’t so much as a command list you sort of rely on your no brainer stylus strokes to get you by. EA also decided to spice this up a little by including small ‘mini-games’ in between the dancing sections of the songs. These quickly become tedious affairs where you often have no clue what you’re meant to be doing and probably wouldn’t be able to do them properly even if you did. Singing specific parts of the song with an action bar and placing your feet on a light up dance floor quickly becomes highly repetitive and wasn’t even a good mechanic in the first place. The lack of explanation and a half decent tutorial mode make the game very difficult to take an interest in either competitively or through single play. There are separate modes which allow you to play songs along to a set of actions and commands like your usual rhythm game but these only let you play in free play rather than the career mode so you quickly find yourself stuck with the same Britney Spears song that you started with and can’t choose to compete through your career in this way, which is a bit of a shame for those gamers who need compulsory tasks to complete things.

Boogie also includes a level of customisation which isn’t necessary to the game but has been a staple of EA’s products for a few years now. All five characters are changeable with new clothes and designs but sadly you aren’t able to create your own dancers, having to modify those already programmed into the game. Although a little fun, it doesn’t really go as far as you would hope, only really letting you change the colours of your dancing buddy which hardly breeds individualism.

This freedom to do as you like is clearly EA’s way of interacting with a new generation of gamer, which has only known portable technology throughout their life and knows no barriers to their expression. Of course this is probably a good thing in my eyes, expectations and predictability should always be challenged and this is one the reasons I am happy with the way Boogie allows you to express yourself on a new level. The technical feat of including such a vast array of full length music tracks into a DS game is also worth a mention, something which isn’t usually done and I believe they have gone far beyond the track selection set in Elite Beat Agents. For a traditional rhythm gamer though it’s a little difficult to adjust to the difficulty of creating your own groove when sometimes, you just want to be told what to do.

6/10