The Smurfs: Dance Party (Wii)

Ubisoft had a great idea in taking the formula of their popular Wii casual game series Just Dance and applying franchise licenses to it, but why they thought adapting the 2011 live action Smurfs movie into this style was the best route is baffling. While the little blue characters have always had a song in their heart and some bounce in their step, they certainly aren’t known for their dance moves, and Ubisoft further made this adaptation choice puzzling by taking the one scene in the film where they dance to modern music and completely brushing over it in the game’s story mode.

The Smurfs: Dance Party is certainly a strange idea conceptually, but that Just Dance base definitely does it quite a few favors. Everything from the pictogram style of dance instructions to the format the back of the game box takes is pretty much transplanted from Just Dance just with a blue coat of paint over it, the player watching the Smurfs or their nemesis Gargamel dance on screen to music that has often been adjusted to be more fitting for the franchise. The story mode is something unique compared to the games that inspired it though, Papa Smurf recounting to the other Smurfs in Smurf village the events of the film. This short eight dance long story follows the events from them being transported to New York, meeting real world humans, and trying to stop the evil wizard Gargamel from gaining more power. The method of telling the story is certainly strange, movie stills being used for most of Papa Smurf’s narration but seemingly random scenes from the movie were included as video clips. One might be something that is important like the Smurfs finding a book about their history, but another just has a human freak out when they first see a Smurf. The exact points where a dance is thrown in can be strange as well, the earlier mentioned missed moment of skipping an actual dance scene in the film instead choosing to give Smurfette a dance number where she breaks out into a song during a heart to heart with a human.

However, despite the odd license choice and structuring of the plot, once you get to the dancing in The Smurfs: Dance Party, you find a game that is at least as competently designed as the early Just Dance games. During a song, players need to move the hand holding their Wii remote to match the pictograms that appear on screen, these meant to instruct the player on how to move but sometimes coming up a little short. The speed of movements and some more unique dance moves can’t quite be captured by simple human silhouettes scrolling by, but watching the Smurfs dance on screen can fill in many of the blanks. Many moves are repeated over the course of the dance and the game expects you to remember the sequence of actions with gradually fewer pictogram hints, and in most cases it is easy enough to internalize the dance instructions.

Players will earn points based on how well they imitated the move on screen, a 1 to 3 star ranking being applied to normal moves and special golden moves providing 4 if done right, although missing a move is not only possible but incredibly likely. The same detection issues from the first Just Dance game are present in The Smurfs: Dance Party, the Wii Remote not picking up every movement properly and making it incredibly difficult to do the on-screen dances perfectly. There is no losing a dance in The Smurfs: Dance Party though, the player instead trying to get the best score they can. The score system seems to expect errors as you can still get a pretty high score even with misses and low rated moves, but it’s very difficult to do a song perfectly because of problems outside of your control. As in Just Dance, The Smurfs: Dance Party will rate moves that involve the movement of both hands even though you can only be holding the Wii remote in one. The motion sensing remote cannot pick up the motions of a body part that isn’t even holding it, and this can cause certain things like players getting points for doing nothing when the game wants the free hand to do a move or telling you that you missed a move with that hand despite it having no way of truly knowing. As an experiment I set the remote down and let it do a few songs with no movement, and while most gave me no points, some did reward me perfect ratings for the actions the player’s free hand would have been performing.

One major unexpected form of assistance comes from a glowing hand the dancers get after you perform some of the early moves in a song properly. This seems to be Smurf Power, and while it has its importance when it comes to scoring, it also properly indicates which part of the dancers on screen you are meant to be mimicking. This is definitely a boon for the young audience this game is intended for, the mirrored nature of the demonstration perhaps going over their heads, but it also gives older players something clear to track visually that can sometimes assist with the more detailed moves. Gargamel seems to not always have this glowing hand appear in his small selection of songs, but his dances tend to include exaggerated movements so they are still fairly legible. The choreography in The Smurfs: Dance Party is actually pretty good and enjoyable to dance to despite the game being bad at detecting your movements. It’s fun to get your body up and moving, as is the nature of dancing, and in addition to traditional dance moves, The Smurfs: Dance Party has many thematic motions like pretending to do a record scratch or posing like the Statue of Liberty during a song about New York. Many of these are built like the dance moves you’d see in a children’s show, easily understood actions like shushing found in a song about a noisy Smurf, flexing motions being integrated into a song about being physically fit, and Gargamel’s songs featuring movements befitting a wizard. On top of the more typical body and hand motions you’d expect from energetic dances, the moves would have been a good fit if they were actually rated appropriately.

The songs on offer are certainly strange, mostly because many of them have been adjusted to be about The Smurfs. “Who Let the Dogs Out?” is now “Who Let the Smurfs Out?”, “Boombastic” is now “Mr. Smurftastic”, and “I Like to Move It” has become “I Like to Smurf It”. There are some songs that are present without Smurfication like Katy Perry’s “One of the Boys” and Bruno Mars’s “Just the Way You Are”, and while watching the poor quality smurf models dance with strange, often empty expressions might hurt the appeal of moving to these songs, they are well designed for their purpose and the song quality is going to come down to subjective tastes. Mr. Smurftastic has come out rather rough though, the imitation of Shaggy’s reggae singing style sounding very unusual, but many of the songs have surprisingly strong choruses. The likes of Gargamel, The Noisy Smurf, and Welcome to New York have some incredibly catchy refrains designed to drill themselves into your memory even after you’ve only heard them once, and what’s surprising is that some of these like Gargamel were original creations for the game.

Outside of the short story mode there isn’t too much to do but dance to the 20+ songs on offer, but there is a two player mode for simultaneous dancing and a small gimmick mode where your dancing is occasionally interrupted. During this mode, you might sometimes be asked to freeze, the player not performing any dance moves until the condition fades. You might also instead need to shake your Wii remote wildly when a potion appears near your score, but while these are technically a different way to play, mild interruptions don’t really add any longevity to the game, especially since they just ask you to stop enjoying the thrill of moving around and instead either wait in place or wave your arm around a bit mindlessly before getting back to the choreographed dances.

THE VERDICT: While some will be repulsed by the very concept of The Smurfs: Dance Party, besides some corny lyrics and the Smurf character models, it is essentially Just Dance, and that means it achieves about the same degree of quality. The dancing is fun to do and well choreographed, with some unique moves thrown in to make it appealing to kids and the glowing hand an accidental way to make following along with the dances more accessible. However, players young and old will have their dancing fun diminished by the Wii remote’s inability to accurately read the actions they’re making, and with the occasional difficulty in reading the pictograms, The Smurfs: Dance Party ends up borrowing the same flaws as the game that inspired it while being more niche because of its unusual licensing choice.

And so, I give The Smurfs: Dance Party for Wii…

A BAD rating. Simple physical fun has once more been tarnished by an unfair judge thanks to Ubisoft’s struggles to properly adapt the dances it wants players to do with what the Wii’s limited motion controls can actually pick up. The presence of scored moves with the hand the game can’t actually read remains the most glaring issue even though it isn’t as present here as it was in the first Just Dance game, but the pictogram problems persist and sometimes figuring out how it wants the remote moved and held in the heat of a dance complicates things in an unfortunate way. The fact you can still score well and get up and enjoy performing the moves regardless of what the game thinks still gives this some appeal, although dancing along with a video instead or making up your own moves could be just as fun and you wouldn’t be told you’re doing it wrong by a flawed scoring system.

The Smurfs license, while a strange fit, doesn’t actually do too much damage to the game’s quality. In fact, while songs like Gargamel and Welcome to New York don’t really hold up as full pieces of music, they can be pretty catchy and provide some silliness to enjoy. The franchise’s use of Smurf as an all-purpose adjective gives the player some funny lines to enjoy, seeing Grouchy Smurf try to be grumpy while dancing makes his character model fun to watch, and the entire concept is just so strange that seeing how it’s executed is appealing in its own way. It certainly won’t justify itself over the broad appeal of a typical Just Dance’s better constructed song lists and the gameplay still lacks the design needed to make dancing with a Wii remote a reliable form of interaction, but this bad little dance game at least didn’t completely smurf it up.