These aren't bebe's kids.
Floor kids is a rhythm dancing game developed and published by MERJ Media. Take on the role of multiple kids who are just feeling the beat of the music and become the star of the town with all your sick dance moves. Can you be the freshest of all the neighborhoods? Except Bell Air,that spot is filled.
Story:
You star as one of many kids with the sole purpose of working your way up from the streets,getting a crew and showing everyone just who the sickest and most fresh dancer is on the mean streets of the city. Embark on your musical journey as you kick,flip and spin your way to ultimate stardom and street rep.
Game play:
The game play of Floor Kids is not like any music game I have played before. This is coming from my own personal opinion on games I've played from this genre such as Just Dance,Parappa The Rapper,DDR and other music related games I can't remember off the top of my head at this point in time as I'm writing this. This is what makes Floor Kids unique.
Earlier before, I stated that you start off your ''adventure'' or ''journey'' by picking a specific kid to play as in order to start on your way to becoming a dancing legend in your city. When you start up your campaign and story mode you're given the choice of picking through a multitude of differently skilled dancers. Each dancer being better in a different dance style,such as power,freeze,top rock, down rock. It's best to give each kid a trial run before ultimately choosing which you want to take with you during a full story run.
The basic moves you will start off with are Top rock and Down rock and each move can be coordinated with tapping A,B,X,Y to do another move in your dance list to set yourself up for multiple combination style of moves. I used an Xbox controller lay out for PC so just follow your preferred controllers layout for best results on Switch. But it's not just all about pressing those buttons, not that simple!
Along with having to press A,B,X,Y, you must also use the joystick by pressing up and down along with one of the face buttons to perform an entirely different move altogether. The better the variety of moves you do in conjunction with another will allow you to get more points and more crowd recognition. The more the crowd is into it,the higher your points will raise and soon the crowd will even start telling you to do specific power moves in order to impress them. If you complete their request successfully,you will be awarded top points and get better fan feedback from the audience. You feel like a bad ass when you pull this off!
But don't get too comfortable yet,during breaks in the song you're offered a more traditional way to play the game. This form of game play offers more of a Guitar Hero type of approach that most people are used to or even the same stuff you saw years ago in Parappa The Rapper. Boxes pop up on your screen in front of you and its your job to time each button press with the beat of the song, match the musical squares on screen to get a high percentage of accuracy to keep the crowd in the moment and keep them feeling hyped up! don't lose your fans!
As I mentioned before, the crowd starts wanting to give their input into what moves they want you to pull off and it's your choice whether you want to ignore them or not. If you choose to ignore their requests, your score will stay lower and you will bum them out and kill all the vibe,don't do this. The requests I got the most were power moves. Power moves can be executed by rotating the left stick in a circle,which makes your character go straight into a windmill break dance move. Do a windmill and then move straight into a move from the face buttons to really wow the crowd and impress them!
So what is the point of hyping the crowd you ask? a lot actually. Pleasing the crowd goes a long way to earning crowns for each level that you play. The more you impressed the crowd,the more moves you hit and the higher the score you get, the more crowns you get and earn. These crowns are used to go to new stages and they're also useful in unlocking brand new characters to choose from. Collecting as many crowns as possible by re-doing levels to top your best score. The more people you can get in your crew the better, you can never have too many fans. So get those dang crowns,right now!
All new characters you wish unlock have to be unlocked using what is called the Breakdeck. In this break deck you must unlock specific parts of a players cards to unlock them as a character. Each new character in the game requires 4 different cards to fully unlock them completely. Collect crowns to find each and every card so you can find the remaining 7 characters in the game. Counting yourself,that makes 8 playable characters that its possible to choose from.
Environment/Music:
I'm really liking what I see when I play this game. Everything looks like its pencil animated and the way the characters look scribbled and hand drawn really makes the game stand out against all the other rhythm games currently on the market visually. I don't see very many games now a days that go for a very basic style,but have it come out so damn unique that I just fall in love with it. Kudos to the design team for this one,hats off.
The music is pretty damn fire too. I want this soundtrack. I'm not familiar with the artist behind the music in this game,Kid Koala, but after playing the game for lengthy period and getting caught up in the beat and style of the music, I gotta say, Koala has made a new fan. I'm about to go pull up the music playlist of Floor Kids on my PC right now and listen to it. Oh wait, scratch that, what do you think I'm listening to right now while making this review? that's right, Kid Koala Floor Kids OST *mic drop*
Replayability:
I wouldn't say there's a TON of replayability in this game. The only thing's that might be worth mentioning have to do with going back to each and every level to try to get the top score and collecting as many crowns as you can get to unlock every single character. That can be pretty time consuming and it's pretty fun. Give it a go.
There is also a two player multiplayer, but I did not get to play this mode because I do not have any friends because I'm not hip nor fresh, so it is what it is. If you have some friends that you want to go 1 on 1 against and dance their face into the turf then you have all the avenues to do it. Show them who's boss and show them you're not one to be trifled with.
Final thoughts:
My ultimate conclusion of Floor Kids after spending countless hours playing through it is that it's an extremely fun game. It's a different kind of rhythm game that doesn't come around too often anymore. Most music games take the tried and true formula of a Just Dance or DDR, but this one decides to take on hip hop musical rhythm game in a whole new direction that I personally haven't seen or enjoyed before and I absolutely adore it for that.
While the game doesn't really have that much of an engaging storyline with it being only consisting of some splashing of cutscenes here and there that don't really matter in the wide span of things, it makes up for it with its charm,its music,its style and uniqueness in order to make me say this is a must have if you love rhythm games.
Floor Kids is out now on PC/Switch
*Review code for Floor Kids provided by MERJ Media
