Do androids dream of an electric beat?
In a deviation from the standard robot role in video games as murderous antagonist or cannon fodder, Robot Dance Party sees agitated androids hitting the dance floor to body pop and moonwalk the night away.
On opening the game for the first time, you create your own robot from a selection of parts before taking them out for a tutorial level. Before you know it, cogs and gears are flying all over the place as your mechanical creation starts shaking its pistons like there’s no tomorrow.
Your actual interaction with Robot Dance Party, apart from staring in bewilderment at a cyborg recreating Saturday Night Fever, is in tapping and sliding various onscreen prompts when they appear in time to music. Some prompts need to be held down, while others need to be tapped once or repeatedly, and so on.
As you go through the game’s meagre collection of songs, increasingly complex moves are introduced, with higher difficulty settings throwing more prompts at you to deal with. The cost of missing a step is a mistake from your robot and a reduction in your total score, but there’s no game over for cocking up a la Guitar Hero/Rockband.
At its best, Robot Dance Party is quite reminiscent of Elite Beat Agents, with the combination of catchy tapping in time to the music and the ludicrous display of mechanical manoeuvres going on in the background making it hard not to smile. The robotic dance animations are never going to match the moves of the real superimposed dancers in the Just Dance games, but they’re goofy enough to chuckle at.
Unfortunately, the game suffers from a woeful lack of staying power, not just because the songs are a truly awful mishmash of forced EDM sounds and robo-puns, but because of the way the game pads itself out. You have to keep repeating the same levels over and over to gain experience before unlocking more levels, by which time you’ll be so sick of a poorly autotuned woman drawling out binary code as backing vocals that it doesn’t seem worth the effort.
What’s more, customisation is made less enticing by the fact that only the robotic parts you are currently using level up, giving your score a boost and taking you one step towards escaping binary woman’s early work, before you can head onto her later stuff where she really started going downhill (or presumably she did, I didn’t actually get that far).
Robot Dance Party at least has the good sense to incorporate a multiplayer mode, and is probably silly enough on its own merits to warrant a free download, especially if the idea of a robot doing a Michael Jackson impression appeals. But after the novelty wears off and you’ve left the app alone for a bit, you probably won’t be saying “I’ll be back.” (That’s from Terminator. I’ll try harder next time.)
Robot Dance Party is out now on iOS and Android. Developer: DeNA Corp. Website
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