When any Indie developer can implement Avatars into their game, the end result is no surprise: Many of them will pick extremely simple concepts, some of which are only games in the most generous sense of the word, and slap on Avatar support as the main selling point. Sadly, Avatar Boogie 2 continues this trend by letting you control a basic dance floor populated by random Avatars (you can also use your own Avatar in Freestyle mode) and instruct them to follow basic dance steps. If that sounds even remotely exciting, rest assured that it isn’t.
The game, such as it is, mostly consists of interacting with a few menus to set up the dance environment. You’re given your choice of several basic routines for the randomly generated Avatars - there can be as many as 105 - to follow, along with some music from a variety of genres and your own music library is supported as well. From there, you can adjust dancing speed and choose from three backgrounds: A giant vinyl record for the Avatars to stand upon, a basic floor with floating ’BOOGIE!’ words joined by strobing colored lighting, and what appears to be some kind of dance club where the lights and the floor are also made of strobing colored lights.
While the lighting is adjustable to some extent, it should be noted it’s genuinely painful to look at on almost any setting. This isn’t the well done lighting you’re used to on current generation consoles and games, instead it has much in common with what you would see in Quake 2, Daikatana, and other late-90s peers. This isn’t an exaggeration, and users are strongly advised to set the lighting to a non-strobing mode as soon as possible.
Once you’ve done that, you can get to the heart of the matter; Avatar Boogie 2’s "Freestyle Mode." This mode lets you use your Avatar rather than randomly generated ones, and you can use the left analog stick to flip through a list of dance moves then press the button of the one you want your Avatar to do. To be fair, some of these are decently animated for Avatar fare and you might be amused by it... for a few seconds. It loses its charm very quickly.
Given it’s Avatar Boogie 2’s main selling point, I thought perhaps I was doing something wrong. After all, making a Frank West (Dead Rising) Avatar dance around like a fool was only funny for a very short time, but maybe another Avatar would fix it? Thus I tried Avatars that resembled Char Aznable (Gundam), the Doom Marine (Doom), and even a random design with all sorts of silly items placed on them. No matter how cool, ridiculous, or outlandish my Avatar was, they didn’t really make Avatar Boogie 2 fun and this highlights a major point: If your game isn’t fun without Avatars, it probably won’t be salvaged by adding them.
Avatar Boogie 2 was released at an ironic time. It came out at the same time as several games from the Indie Games Winter Uprising 2010 event, which was specifically organized to combat the stereotype that XBL Indie Games is home to only zombie fad games, massage apps, and Avatar cash-ins. While it’s only $1/80 MSP, to be honest it should have been a free tech demo to show what Avatars are capable of. As is, it has only the most rudimentary of game mechanics and many of its backgrounds feature painful, strobing colored lights. Investing even a little time and money on this to hurt your eyes seems like a silly idea, and with that in mind I urge readers to pick up one of the titles in the Winter Uprising list instead.
