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Target a children audience, make a game to Disney’s biggest musical and finally slap Zac Efron and pals on the cover and bam, rest assured the Benjamin’s will be rolling in. Fans of the movies will enjoy mixing-and-matching characters in ways never seen onscreen, as well as creating their own East High Wildcat, but will quickly get frustrated with the game's core "dancing" mechanic that's really just flailing with the dance pad and errors.
The core gameplay can is purely focused on dancing and even comes with a neat little dance pad to rock out Dance Dance Revolution style. With the dance mat on the floor and feet ready, players simply step in the direction indicated by a large dot that drift across a wheel onscreen, loosely correlating to the beat of the selected song.
Although players are occasionally asked to clap, spin, twirl or hold stage poses, the result isn't very dancelike. The game version also has a nasty habit of loading in the middle of a song. In nearly every song (sometimes multiple times) the game will freeze and the Wildcat loading logo will pop up for a couple seconds. This is ridiculously lame and annoying for a music game to freeze in the middle of a song. Like seriously, it throws you off beat, ruins your combo, and completely pulls you out of the experience. And no other version does this, so why does the version on the most powerful system have that problem? Imagine yourself being in the middle of rocking out then the game pauses, you better hope that instant your dance position wasn’t an uncomfortable one.
In fact the 360 version is sub par as a whole. While the game doesn't feature stellar motion capturing, it isn't bad and is certainly better than many other Wii or PS2 games. But when it's on the 360 the game looks wonky and robotic. You just expect more from a 360 game. Unfortunately, the game was made with the Wii in mind first and foremost and it shows.
During the selected song, a scene from the appropriate "High School Musical" film plays in the background, featuring decent animated versions of the movie characters crooning. However, their dance moves never resemble what the player's being asked to do, and there's no visual feedback if the player makes a mistake. Sharpay and Ryan may be holding hands and waltzing blithely to "Bop to the Top," but the player's stuck doing the elbow-jerk.
There are opportunities to influence the onscreen scenes, however. Players pick two characters, a boy and a girl, for each song, even if the number doesn't belong to them in the film. Kids are sure to love creating unlikely mashups, especially with a friend along for two-player collaborative and competitive modes.
There's also a "Create a Wildcat" utility that lets players customize the existing "High School Musical" characters or build their own. Outfits, accessories and other details are continually unlocked through play.
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It's easy to imagine fans making digital versions of themselves to insert into the musical numbers, especially girls who've always fantasized about performing a romantic duet with Efron's Troy. But buying this game on the Xbox 360 is just a bad mistake.
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