Floor Kids

Genre: Music-Rhythm

Players: 1-2 Competitive (Alternating)

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Review:

Floor Kids is a Music-Rhythm game released on Nintendo Switch in 2017 and ported to PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One in 2018. This game has players competing in dance competitions where they do various dance moves to the rhythm of a beat.

The presentation here is somewhat low-budget, and some elements fare better than others. The 2D artwork for the dancers and backgrounds is simple and sketchy-looking, but the dance move animations are really nice and evocative and combine well with the sketchy style to make something that looks visually interesting. The music, on the other hand, is completely disposable, sounding like wordless, bland, repetitive themes that mimic the overall feel of the sort of music you might have at this sort of dance competition without doing anything distinct in their own right.

The gameplay at least aims for something interesting, feeling almost like a combination of a Music-Rhythm game and something akin to a Tony Hawk game, with players tapping buttons to the time of the beat, but also giving them the freedom to choose which moves to do at any given time, with those moves mapped to different combinations of buttons and analog stick directions.

The problem is that Tony Hawk games at least had different levels for you to explore, and Floor Kids has you doing your moves in one spot, and gives you very little reason to do anything specific or different than you might do on any other play session. Sure, sometimes characters in the audience shout out a type of move for you to perform, but for the most part you’re free to just do anything, in any order, in any combination, without any indication that any move is better than any other move, so you’ll just end up cycling through them until someone shouts out a request, you’ll do that request, and then go back to random cycling. Ho-hum.

It’s frustrating that this game doesn’t do more to build on its unique concept, because the idea of a dance competition game that lets you freely use moves as you like in time with the beat is a really great idea. It’s just unfortunate that Floor Kids does little to make any move better than any other, or to make any of the game’s levels cater more to one type of move than another, or even to make the soundtrack interesting. The result is a game that aims to be stylish and cool but just ends up bland before too long.

tl;dr – Floor Kids is a Music-Rhythm game where players take the role of a competitor in a dance competition. The gameplay here combines Music-Rhythm elements with a Tony Hawk-style trick system, but doesn’t do enough to differentiate between the different types of dance moves. This combined with the boring soundtrack makes Floor Kids a far more bland experience than it should be given its inspired concept.

Grade: C

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