Review: High School Musical TV Game
Written on Dec 16, 2008 by Brian and filed under Jakks Pacific, Reviews
High School Musical is quite the phenomenon, and now it’s a TV Game, thanks to Jakks Pacific. The kids of East High have summer jobs at a country club while dealing with the requisite drama surrounding Troy, Gabriella and Sharpay.
Setup
It’s very easy to get started with this game, simply add four AA batteries (not included) and connect two cables to a TV, one for video and one for audio. The Controller has A and B buttons as part of a music note to the left of the joystick controller. At the front of the base are the menu button and power button, which is disguised as a music not and actually something that can be missed entirely the first time.
Gameplay
The base gameplay consists of controlling Sharpay, or more appropriately Sharpay’s pink golf cart, as she socializes around the country club. Her cell phone rings frequently with various tasks to complete. There are three mini-games, along with a collecting game where Sharpay has to collect 10 missing objects in five minutes.
Each mini game has to be completed at nine levels to win the game. The nine levels are broken into three three-level chunks, so you essentially have to play each mini game three times at progressively harder levels. Additionally Sharpay has to locate missing items twice, which can actually be difficult as the main map is reasonably large for a game like this.
The first mini-game encountered is Food Fiasco. In this game Troy must wait tables and clean up for tips. The game is repetitive though, as there are only four possible menu items for each table and tables with two people share a single dish. What’s a little odd is that serving a single milkshake, bowl of soup or a salad can net a tab of $36. The customers are also repetitive, frequently you’ll see two or three identical sets of people at the four tables Troy waits.
Baseball Boogie is another mini game where Chad and Ryan dance on the baseball diamond. Six symbols scroll by (A, B, left, right, up and down) and the player has to match and time the proper symbols with a gauge at the bottom of hte screen. To compelte each level players have to play the game once as Chad and again as Ryan. There’s not much difficulty here and again the game feels repetitive.
The last mini game is Gourmet Creations where kids will help Zeke make food orders. As the orders come in players select the ingredients, and perform some machination (press and hold the A button, move the joystick back and forth, etc.) to cook and plate the food. Again, our test group found it to be repetitive and not terribly interesting.
The game supports multiple profiles, so more than one child can play and save their progress with HSM. The game can be completed in 40-45 minutes by advanced players; but most kids will take an hour or more.
Bottom Line
For a game that’s aimed at tweens, the tasks aren’t very engaging or difficult. And while we generally look the other way on graphics, for older kids, they might be a problem. For the price we generally like these TV Games, but this time the end result doesn’t match the expectations of the audience very well. Only the most die-hard HSM fans will potentially have fun with this game.
2 out of 5 stars
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