Groove to the beat and jive with the funk in MERJ’s hip new breakdance battle game; Floor Kids.

The Story

There’s not that much of a traditional story to speak of in Floor Kids. In essence, you play as an up-and-coming breakdance protege who is looking to find their own style and groove. You travel across a beautifully sketched city busting moves in various colourful and quirky locations. Strange animals narrate the game to you in almost spoken-word like verses, preparing you for the battles ahead as you visit places like The Grocery Store, The Art Space and The Arcade. Each place you visit has three unique tracks, produced by DJ/ Producer Kid Koala. Along the way, if your skills are high enough, you pick up new members and form a crew; the ‘Floor Kids’. When your crew is skilled and talented enough, the game comes to its completion at the Peace Conference. Where the Floor Kids get to show off their freshest and boldest moves to an audience of people from around the world.

The Game

The best way to describe Floor Kids is a mix of rhythm game and combo game like Tony Hawks Pro Skater. You have to perform combos along to the beat of the excellently mixed music to score points and gain crowns, which unlock new stages and dancers. Different dance moves are performed with the left stick and the face buttons. Each face button has its own move which must be timed to the beat of the song, this is the most basic move and is called Top Rock. Then, by holding down the left stick and continuing to tap a face button along to the rhythm preforms a Down Rock. Next, by holding the left stick in a direction (let’s say left) and holding a face button down that coincides with that direction (so Y), causes your dancer to preform a Freeze. Be careful though, because if a Freeze lasts longer than two bars (8 beats) your dancer will fall over. The final move is a Power Move that is controlled with the left stick by twirling it in a clockwise or anticlockwise direction. The Power Move can then be altered by holding the R or L bumper buttons, performing a totally new move. Though it sounds quite complicated, these are the most basic moves of the game and become second nature after playing a few tracks.

The more you try out these new moves, the quicker you can learn combos. Combos appear as prompts telling you the name of different moves that should be linked together. At the start of the game, combos can be hard to pull off as you may not know all of your dancer’s moves off by heart. However, take a glance at the Breakdeck and you’ll soon learn all of a dancer’s moves and be able to pull off epic combos. Pro Tip- combos are the key to getting the highest score so learn them as soon as you can!

Further depth is added to the game because each dance is marked on five different categories: Funk, Flavour, Flow, Fire, Flyness- the five F’s. Funk is how accurate you are with timing moves to the beat. Flow is how many combos you use together in a track. Fire is how many requests from the crowd you fulfil and how fast you fulfil them. Finally, Flyness is how many advanced techniques you used in a track. These moves you have to learn by yourself. This is because Floor Kids gives no tutorial on how to do these techniques, forcing you to experiment with different buttons on the Switch’s controller! They include moves like: Holds, Poses and Hops. Each category is given a mark out of ten, with the game doing and excellent job of breaking down your score and showing you what you need to improve on to get better.

The last game mechanic is a beat section where you have to press the B button in time with prompts on the screen. This happens twice in a song and is the game’s version of a bonus section, where you are given more points the more accurate you are. What’s interesting is that each song has its own unique beat section, so some songs may need a few play throughs to learn the beat section and gain the 5 crowns on that track.

To summarise, this mixture of complex gameplay mechanics creates an extremely fun and addictive game, which I throughly enjoyed. My main character was Bizzy, as I quickly learnt all of her combos. Nevertheless, I would usually play through a new track first with one or two other characters. This was to get a feel for the beat section and because it was extremely fun. Each character has their own unique dance style and it really shakes the game up playing as someone different, which gives the game a lot of replay value. In addition, Floor Kids has a multiplayer dance-battle mode where you can challenge a friend to a dance off!

Art and Music

Floor Kids’s premise is on its unique art style and original soundtrack created by Kid Koala. The art is unbelievable, every frame is hand drawn and looks fantastic! It blows my mind to think how much time it must have taken to animate each unique dance move and character. This is because switching between moves visually flows, there is never a stop or break between them. Even if a dancer is on the floor, the transition between floor moves and upright moves is effortless. It shows the creativity an ingenuity of JonJon and his art team.

Naturally, because Floor Kids is a rhythm game based around Hip-Hop, the music had to be good. And of course, Kid Koala delivers. Each track is fresh but fits the tone of the venue you are dancing in. Even the menu music is great, I have it playing as a write this review. What I also like is the small details with the sound. How in the Breakdeck, it makes a scratching noise (like when a DJ scratches the vinyl on a track) when you scroll through your dance moves. Or the announcers voice counting you into a song or informing you you’ve unlocked a new player; it all sounds fantastic.

Problems

Depending how good you are at rhythm games, some players might argue Floor Kids is too short. I beat the game with five crowns on every track and all characters unlocked and it took me between 2-3 hours. I didn’t get five crowns on every track the first try of course, some tracks took me two or three attempts. However, when playing with Bizzy, I knew there was a high chance of me maxing out the track on the first try. This is because I learnt all of her combos early on in the game, so the only thing that would stop me getting the top score was the beat section of the track, which is why some tracks took me a few goes. For me, this wasn’t a problem because I play a lot of games and sometimes playing shorter ones is a refreshing change. However, for someone who may only buy one game a month this might seem like a problem. On the other hand, there is replay value in the fact you have 8 unique characters to play through the tracks with, so bare that in mind.

My second problem was that once you learnt how to really play Floor Kids it becomes a little too easy. Like a said, when playing with Bizzy I knew I could max out a track on my first try, if the beat section wasn’t too difficult. This made the game almost become like a science, I knew exactly what I needed to do and when to do it to gain the five crowns. I’m not trying to brag, I wouldn’t consider myself good at rhythm games but I do play guitar, so maybe that helped! This just meant in the later stages there wasn’t much of a challenge for me. In a way it kind of made me sad because I knew the game would be ending soon and I didn’t want it to!

Finally, there was some times in the game where the input didn’t seem 100% responsive and would sometimes get confused on what move I was preforming. This only happened a few times. Nevertheless, if the input messes up whilst you’re trying to preform a mega combo that can be frustrating and may cause you to have to restart the track.

Summary

I have been watching let’s plays of Floor Kids for while now on Youtube, so I thought I knew what to expect from the game. Nevertheless, playing the game first hand has vastly exceeded those expectations and though it was quite short, the time I spent in the game was nothing but a joy. The mechanics, the art and the music make this a must play for any Hip-Hop or rhythm game fan that owns a Nintendo Switch. Sure there are a few kinks, but they are significantly outweighed by the creativity, love and thought the developers put into this game.

Therefore, I give Floor Kids by MERJ my rating of

Have you played Floor Kids? What did you think? Let me know your thought on the game and my review over on Twitter or join the conversation on Discord– it’s where all the coolest and freshest people hang out!

Like this: Like Loading...