Gaming Trend

Gaming Trend Review

by Tim Wilson

I had absolutely no idea what this game was when I popped it into my DS. I knew it had something to do with Red Bull, and BC One sounded like some sort of prehistoric kart racing, so I was hoping for a bunch of cavemen hopped up on energy drinks racing around a track on brontosauruses. That game would have probably been awesome. Unfortunately, reality rarely lives up to my imagination.
 
Red Bull BC One is actually an international breakdancing competition. Every year Red Bull inexplicably gathers breakdancers from around the world to compete in one-on-one dance offs. Not only is this a fantastic plot for a cheesy '80s movie, someone apparently though it would make a great idea for a video game. So how do mad b-boy skillz translate to the DS, yo? Read on to find out.

My first thought when seeing the graphics for this game was, “Wow, they’ve not only brought back great ‘80s breakdancing, they’ve brought back horrible ‘80s graphics!” Somehow I doubt they were going for nostalgia. Your dancing avatar is constructed of low-res vector polygons – which, while great for animation – are lousy for conveying anything resembling reality. What makes this particularly hilarious is the fact that there is a character creator in which you can customize various aspects of your avatar such as hair, clothes, and face. Considering your avatar doesn’t have a recognizable face, I found this to be a particularly difficult choice. Should I select the guy whose face was made up of five bland orange triangles, or go nuts with that crazy seven-triangle face guy? After finally settling on five-triangle face guy and fixing him up with black triangle hair and a shirt with a giant star on it, I was confident that I would be the envy of poorly drawn polygonal breakdancing guys everywhere.

The menu system doesn’t even get the advanced technology of 3D polygons. Various game modes are selected via generic symbols with plain text descriptions. Seriously, Playlogic, I have nicer menus on my ATM. I wish that was a joke.
 
The one bright spot in the graphics department is that the dance animations are relatively well done. However, it’s unlikely you’ll get to notice them much since you’ll be too busy frantically connecting dots in order to win matches. What does connecting dots have to do with breakdancing? I still don’t know. More on that later.

When first starting the game, it warns you that “FOR THE BEST GAME EXPERIENCE, USE HEADPHONES.” Well, I don’t know about you, but when I play a breakdancing game sponsored by an energy drink manufacturer, I settle for nothing but the best game experience. So I donned my headphones and prepared to bust a move.

All sarcasm aside, the soundtrack is a pretty good – if slightly generic – set of hip-hop mixes that I’m sure any homeboy could shred with his mad tricks. The downside is that the music has absolutely *nothing* to do with the gameplay. Don’t go in expecting something like Elite Beat Agents, where careful timing and listening to the beats is crucial. The music is merely background filler, so while headphones are certainly a great way to enjoy the music, they’re hardly essential.

Red Bull BC One is controlled entirely through the DS touch-screen. I’m always a little nervous about games that rely heavily on the touch screen, because it’s not always the most accurate of input systems. Fortunately the developers did a commendable job making the game interact with the touch screen in a quick and accurate manner.

The game depends highly on the accuracy of the stylus tracing paths around the screen. I had almost no issues with accuracy or responsiveness, even in the game’s most fast-paced moments. The touch screen implementation is one of the game’s biggest bright spots, and a credit to the excellence of the DS hardware when paired with software that can really utilize it.

It may surprise you to learn that Red Bull BC One’s gameplay has basically nothing to do with dancing. It is a connect-the-dots timed puzzle game which supposedly corresponds to stringing together “dance moves.” The reality is that the gameplay could have been slapped onto anything – a singing title, a cheerleading competition, or an Alaskan crab-fishing simulation – and still had about as much relevance.

In the game’s career mode, you set out to conquer the world of breakdancing by engaging in tournaments in eight different countries. Each tournament consists of four matches except for the last tournament, which consists of eight.
When a match begins, you are presented with a scattered series of colored “dots” (various shapes) on the screen. Using the stylus, you must quickly draw lines to connect all like-colored dots together to form a closed loop. At first these stages start off very simply, with clusters of five to six dots, but as the matches become more challenging you may have to connect batches of fifteen or twenty dots. The trick to the game is figuring out the best way to drag your stylus around to connect all the like-colored dots of a group without touching another color’s dots. Of course, you’re under a very short time limit, so you have to think (and draw) fast to rack up points.

Between every few stages of the dot connecting game, you’ll be able to play one of several different mini-games. These tend to be very simple. One involves using the stylus to “spray paint” the silhouette of a dancer, and another is a game of “Slaps” in which you must simply touch the right or left hand as it lights up. These mini-games serve to give you bonus points to help shore up your score during the match.

Winning a match is as simple as beating the pre-set score of your opponent. However, losing all of your “lives” during a match will result in an automatic loss. You can lose a life by accidentally connecting dots of different colors, or not finishing a loop before the timer runs out. Once you’ve won a match, you’re graded based on your score. ‘A’ grades will unlock mini-games for play separately, while ‘B’ grades will often unlock new outfits.

Unfortunately this is about as deep as Red Bull BC One’s gameplay gets. While the matches get incrementally harder, they never pose a serious challenge if you’re even remotely proficient with the stylus. Once you realize that dots do not have to be connected in a straight line, avoiding other colors becomes simple. The biggest challenge is the time limit, but since patterns do not change upon retrying the match you can see your mistakes coming and plan accordingly. It rarely took me more than two or three tries to pass a stage at any point in the game.

If this sounds a bit dull, it’s because it is. The mechanics of the connect-the-dots puzzle is not necessarily bad – as a mini-game or puzzle mode for some larger game, it would be passably fun. However, it’s just not engaging enough to support an entire title by itself. It doesn’t help that it has absolutely no relation to breakdancing. As such, it feels like a mechanic that was forced on to a license, rather than created from the ground up to support it. Couple it with the terrible graphics, and the result is a boring mish-mash of mediocrity.

In addition to the career mode, the game offers a multiplayer mode, mini-game mode, and the ability to go in and change your avatar around. The career mode is short – I beat it in around two hours, and there’s little incentive to play through it again other than to beat your scores and unlock all the mini-games. Unfortunately the mini-games are boring in and of themselves, so they’re not much of a reward. If you could actually find another person who owned the game the multiplayer mode might be a decent bonus, but I think chances are you’ll both have better games with which to compete. The avatar customization is laughable – different colors of polygons don’t offer much in the way of fun character creation. Red Bull BC One has very little to offer to anyone. Dance or rhythm game fans won’t get anything from it, as it’s not really a dance or rhythm game. Puzzle fans will find it dull and easy. The title is obviously a quickly and cheaply produced marketing tie-in that does a disservice to gamers and breakdancing fans. It’s somewhat ironic that an energy drink has attached its name to a game so good at lulling you to sleep. Save your money for dancing lessons or a case of actual Red Bull. I promise that either will be more entertaining than this borefest.

Gaming Trend Score

50

1. Graphics: 30
2. Audio: 70
3. Controls: 80
4. Gameplay: 40
5. Value/Replay: 40
6. OVERALL:50