Looks good but is dangerous, illegal and impossible! They're not men they can't catch and hold a girl alone. And what's with the poms?
Support: DS
Released Date: 2009
Developer: 1st Playable Productions
Publisher: Ubisoft
Genre: Rythm
Players: 1-2 players
Official website
Score
Fun: 2/5
Graphics: 2/5
Gameplay: 1/5
Cheerleading accuracy: 3/5
Pro
- Accurate cheerleading skills (stunts, pyramid, jumps and motions)
- Tons of stuff to unlock (music, outfits…)
- The story characters are well done and cool
- Multiplayer mode is co op
- In the main menu you see the girls stretching and warming up
Cons
- Unrealistic and dangerous executions of stunts and pyramids
- Too basic gameplay
- The game characters are not polished enough
- The interface is sometimes confusing
Review
The first contact you have with the game is the cover. Front: 70′s looking cheerleaders (outfit, poms and jump). It’s a photograph, nothing to do with the game. Back: Poor quality art from the game. Ok, I shouldn’t judge a game by it’s cover, but it’s not starting well. Considering it’s Ubisoft, I was expecting a better general quality. And my first impression stuck when playing. It’s a game that could have been good and had great ideas to put accurate cheerleading skills in, but the gameplay is too basic and boring. You just get to make your character perform motions, the jumps, stunts and pyramids are only to look good between play sequences. The graphics are not that polished too. The DS can really do better. They tried cell shading but on such a low polygons count on the characters and flickering when the scene moves, it doesn’t look good.
The story is about two girls who decide to start a squad because their team suck and there’s no audience to support them. So they thought that if there was a cheerleading squad, more people would come cheer for the team. After some levels, more people join the squad. The closeups of the characters in scenario sequences are cartoon-like, very colorful and fun, very well done.
There are several modes:
- Story: includes a story between each round. Each round is either a challenge (cheer off) or a tutorial for new stuff to manage in the game. Sometimes you aslo have a mini-game.
- Challenge: you can redo the challenges you’ve already made. You can choose music, venue and opponent and difficulty based on the things you have unlocked and paid for.
- Style: you can change the outfits and look of your squad with money you’ve earned.
- Mini-game: if you score well in those games you can earn extra money. There are 3 mini-games: jump rope (you only earn very small amounts unless you are very good), bake sale (earn $1 per cake sold) and mary mack.
- Multiplayer: this is co op. That’s nice. That means that both players are in the same squad and must work together for a combined score.
The customization of the character includes: choosing hair style, outfit color, school colors (very limited), outfit style, theme (graphics in the bottom screen), cheers (moves style). You can also see the trophies won. The music is dynamic and you can unlock more tunes, but it’s not cheerleading mix or famous songs.
Very (too) simple stylus game. Draw lines: up, down, left and right. Sometimes you also have to click on some shapes. It’s supposed to be a rhythm game but you can draw your lines practically any time, you don’t really have a special beat to match. The sequences are really simple. Usually there’s only 2 different moves and about 2-5 moves per sequence. On those 4 basic lines drawn, each squad puts different real cheerleading motions based on “up”, “down”, “left” and “right”. The game can become very repetitive and boring on the long run considering there are so few different things to do.
Between the motions sequence they had your squad perform some jumps and stunts. The jumps are real and hard cheerleading jumps. Plus they are correctly executed. That made me really happy. So far I’ve seen: Toe Touch, Around the world, Side Hurdler, Double Nine, Double Hook and Front Hurdler. I’m sure there are many more but it’s hard to catch them since you are concentrated on the bottom screen and they happen on the top screen. And each girl does a different jump.
Sometimes your squad does stunts and pyramids too. Three girls make an extension (no backspot and no frontspot), turn it into a liberty and the flyer doubles down. And still no back spot to catch her! I know it looks good on the game and it’s fun, but it teaches really bad practices. It’s dangerous and impossible. Almost all the stunts in the game have one girl holding one girl, very often on one feet. Only men can do that. Plus it’s really not safe to not have many people catching the flyers when she goes down. And again, the bases have poms in their hands when doing the stunts, come on! Apart from those problems, the stunts and pyramids are correct and well executed. I’ve seen liberties, liberty pyramids, 2-2-1, cradles, double downs…
The stunts and jumps are only there to look nice. You don’t get to play to make them. They are between the basic motions you do with the stylus. At least they tried to put pyramids and stunts and apart from the wrong number of girls doing it and the poor security they are pretty accurate. That was a nice try. Too bad you can’t play to make stunt, jumps and pyramids. It could have been fun and challenging for the developers.
Tips
- Don’t click on credits unless you want to wait 10 minutes doing nothing, the credits scroll and you can’t do anything.
- In the cheer off there’s a free style mode when you reach the x5 bonus. You can hit any move, that just gives you point. Try and do as many as possible during the short Freestyle period.
- In the cheer off you need to cheer inside the DS microphone sometimes. Of course you can say whatever you want, it still works.
- If you do good in cheer off you unlock new things and get money. The better the score, the more things you unlock and the more money you get to buy unlocked things. You can redo the levels to try and make a better score and unlock more stuff.
