Boogie Bunnies (Xbox 360)

Boogie Bunnies is a match-three puzzler, and the problem with being part of such a crowded genre is it can be difficult to stand out just by listing the small mechanical changes you’ve made to the usual design. Boogie Bunnies thus goes for putting forward its theming instead, the game starring a bunch of colorful, seemingly gelatinous bunnies participating in a dance competition and heading to Hollywood for their shot at stardom. Picking up new moves as they travel across the beach and through jungles, these inch high dancers are meant to charm you and pull you in so you can then see how the color matching gameplay isn’t just your standard format.

In Boogie Bunnies there are ten vertical lanes the bunnies will travel down, new rows appearing near the top of the screen as the bunnies gradually march down to a trench that spells their doom should they reach it. Depending on the mode, the bunnies will either take a step forward to allow new dancers to appear every few seconds in Arcade and Endless or they’ll wait until you’ve made three moves in Classic. Your contribution to clearing out the bunnies before they walk to their doom is firing new bunnies into the pack, and here is where things can get a bit unique. While you’re positioned at the bottom of the screen and launch them up towards the other bunnies, you can also move to the sides of the lanes and fire them in horizontally instead. Thus, even if there’s a potential color match block by bunnies at the front, you can still sometimes get to it with the side lanes, and what’s more, there are technically 12 lanes bunnies can be placed in. The lanes on the edge of the marching bunnies do not have any dancers spawn in naturally, but you can drop bunnies there and they’ll sit and wait. This can seem like a nice place to dump rabbits you don’t have a good match for, but you can also just fire those horizontally through an empty row, discarding them rather than giving yourself more trouble.

 

This does make Boogie Bunnies have an extra strategic layer to it, and the extra freedom in where you fire a rabbit certainly opens things up a bit. It even gels well with the special bunny types gradually introduced, red bunnies blowing up and taking out close by dancers when they go while the purple ones will wipe away all the rabbits in their rows and columns along with them when three or more are lined up. This play style unfortunately doesn’t gel with the cooperative multiplayer option though, players for some reason not able to move past each other which can be aggravating when the bunnies are getting close to the trenches, but the trenches are thankfully not an instant loss either should some bunnies tumble into them. Instead, clearing a level requires building up energy through matches and you lose that energy should bunnies fall, but it can passively drain as well so wasting time finding matches can really come back to bite you in the later levels.

However, some of the strategy that would have been opened up by the extra lanes and shot angles is lost because of a few missing elements. You can only ever know the current bunny you have ready to launch, meaning you have no clue what might be coming next and thus you can’t make many long term plans with how you place your rabbits. The game also does a poor job indicating which lane you’re aiming at, divisions between them especially fuzzy in areas like the Hollywood streets and your only clue being that a bunny in the lane will perk up when targeted. The issue with that is, once you’ve managed to rack up some points and energy with a good set of matches, the bunnies begin to boogie. Their dancing is cute enough and their singing to the music adorable when encountered in the low pressure ice levels at the start, but as you travel, the bunnies also get new outfits, and for some reason, their clothing can contain color overlaps not only between each other’s wardrobes, but the actual color of the bunnies. When they’re dancing and moving all around, it can be difficult to figure out in a hurry where matches might be lined up, and since bunnies arriving from the back won’t automatically match until you add to them or disrupt their arrangement with chain matches, you can’t even be certain that adjacent bunnies can only be paired up to a point.

 

These minor issues are the kind you can easily tolerate when things are going swimmingly, but when you’re close to losing or in the more demanding later levels, you might find yourself making an error because the dancing bunnies like to play dress up. Luckily, Arcade and Classic both contain continue options that start at the beginning of new level types, although Endless is an endurance challenge so mistakes can upset your long term goals there more easily. Unfortunately, the ideas that could have pushed Boogie Bunnies up above a more standard color matching puzzler are pulled back down by the little quibbles, and with it being a rather short and simple game, this color matcher ends up with nothing else that can really draw in player interest unless they really find the jelly bunnies that cute.

THE VERDICT: Boogie Bunnies tries to roll in some ideas to make its match-three play a bit more layered, the freedom to use side lanes and the mix of horizontal and vertical firing options pairing well with the gradual introduction of the explosive bunnies. However, the fact these bunnies dance and get dressed up to play into their cuteness instead leads to confusion at vital times and certain details that could help like clearer lane divisions or which bunnies will be available to launch next aren’t present to really let you embrace more involved matching strategies. Instead you tend to match the bunnies as they come, and while that works well enough for some base line entertainment, you’re not going to get much more out of this color matching puzzler.

 

And so, I give Boogie Bunnies for Xbox 360…

An OKAY rating. It’s rather unfortunate that aesthetic choices to make Boogie Bunnies stand out end up holding it back from being above average. When the bunnies stay still they do their job as pieces in a color matcher well enough, but once they start dancing and wearing cute costumes, they upset the vital visual consistency in a game that already had small issues with it. It wouldn’t be too hard to put Boogie Bunnies on the right path though. Clearer lane divisions would break up the otherwise nice visual backdrops a touch but more than make up for it by allowing for fast paced play. A clearer indicator of where your bunny will hit the group would further allow for greater long term play with fewer frustrating mistakes, the genre standard use of a translucent outline where the piece will land feeling like a no-brainer. Then you can just try and keep the color coding of the rabbits consistent so it becomes less likely you’ll get confused by the similar red and orange rabbits or the times multiple ones are decked out in white. Removing the dancing would of course help with visibility but could have been allowed if other elements were more conducive to continued quick play, and once the player spends less time trying to make out what they’re trying to match and instead thinking of better combos, they’ll be less likely to be bothered by the dancing and more able to appreciate the more unique mechanical shake-ups.

 

It is possible that desire to stand out from the crowd also caused the developers at Artech Studios to strip away common sense features like knowing the next colored bunny you’ll be able to launch, but some things are standard because they work so well for the genre. Boogie Bunnies isn’t hopeless and if you end up playing it for a while it can be a bit of fun as you set up big color combos thanks to having more firing angles than just a few vertical lines, but it’s going to be hard to sell Boogie Bunnies on its special concepts when its basics still needed a bit more work.