Growing up in Canada provided a lot of memorable experiences, one of which was being able to join a Bboy club and demonstrating art in motion. The art of dance is one that most people can relate to since it’s one of the only arts that anybody can pick up easily. Things like playing an instrument or painting a masterpiece require a lot more practice in the beginning, but with dance, it’s an easy form to understand. Of course, if you wanted to take it more seriously, you’d need to invest just as much time as you would in other art mediums, but on the fundamental level all dance requires from you is listening to the rhythm and flowing along with it. This brings us to Floor Kids, an indie title developed for the Nintendo Switch that places focus on breakdancing, a form of dance that requires much needed practice but more importantly, flow.

Having been in the Bboy scene for some time, a chance to try out Floor Kids was an opportunity that couldn’t be missed. You don’t necessarily need to understand or know the names of the moves as you play, it’s all about creativity and seamless movement. If you enjoy a game that encourages creativity and comes with a variety of ways to express your uniqueness, then Floor Kids is one dance title you’ll want to hop on.

As we stated before, dancing requires a certain type of flow, listening to the rhythm and allowing that rhythm to formulate movement. Like the groceries in the supermarket, you always want to keep things fresh, crispy and most importantly, have a lot of variety. In Floor Kids, that premise holds true as each venue you journey to presents a new challenge, and encourages you to think on the fly. Since everything is based on rhythm, much of the gameplay is based around tapping or holding buttons, along with rotating the analog sticks to simulate motion. It’s like DDR for the fingers and requires that you always maintain a consistent flow in order to appease the crowd. Everytime you complete a venue, more characters are unlocked, which open up new doors for you to experiment and test out various styles of breakdancing. Enjoy the all around style of Bizzy? Then master her movesets and unlock more as you progress. Or perhaps you’re more of the top rock style and prefer O-Live to impress the masses.

Whoever you decide on playing is totally up to you, but the fun truly happens when you learn to assimilate with each character’s playstyle and try to incorporate these styles in unique ways. There’s a lot to expect from this game and we’re sure many of you will enjoy it once you get the hang of all the controls. With that said, let’s top rock into the gameplay.

As stated earlier, Floor Kids is a game that places emphasis on flow, creativity and wooing the crowd with unique movements. Repetitive use of the same moves will decrease your flow, while not impressing the crowd will deplete your burning ambition. The opening phases of the game are more or less a tutorial to help you become more comfortable with how everything works, with the game providing flash cards for the character as a reference guide down the road. Should you forget how to do a certain move, all you need to do is go to the Break deck, scan through the selection and search for what you need to work on. While tapping and holding buttons seem fairly easy, you’ll come to realize that much like dance itself, timing and practice is very important.

Harmony is one word that truly describes the gameplay of Floor Kids because it’s all about meshing different moves together in order to create a seamless performance. Spend too much time top rocking and you start to lose flavor, hold a freeze for too long and you’ll fall over resulting in flow loss. It’s about knowing when to move onto something new that becomes the hard part because you just never know how the crowd will respond. Mashing moves out may work in the beginning, but when you get to places like the Arcade or even the Supermarket, all of that mashing will come back to haunt you. Every venue you attend comes with a set of 3 beats that you’ll need to listen to closely and match your tapping to the beat. So this is why mashing buttons may not prove useful because tapping excessively doesn’t really allow you to see what action is coming out, and when to precisely time it so that another move can flow seamlessly with it. So for example, you can mash out top rocking, do cool poses and hold the button down at times to accumulate ‘fly’ points, but then you’ll need to at some point go into down rocking or a power move to create certain combos. Every character has their own unique set of combos that you can use to boost your flow and that’s what will allow you to grab more crowns during your scoring. So pay close attention to Funk, Flavor, Flow, Fire and Flyness every time so that you’re able to determine your weak areas and improve on them for the next venue.

On the topic of earning crowns, these are what help to unlock characters as well as moves as you progress through the game. Each venue as stated before comes with a set of 3 beats and in order to successfully unlock pieces of characters, you’ll need to score at least 3 crowns or higher. So if you want those 5 star rewards, your score will need to have consistent flow along with flyness. Speaking of rewards, what’s truly rewarding about Floor Kids is having the ability to take on your friends via the multiplayer mode. So once you’ve mastered your tricks in the single player realm, you can take on your pals locally, and see who the real Bboy/Bgirl champion is. However, this is where the negatives start to pop up in Floor Kids because despite having the option to play locally, things would’ve really added more flyness if there was the option to play online as well. Whether this option may be included in a future update is up in the air, but that should’ve been a day one deal. Playing Floor Kids online would’ve been a blast since it would truly add that global appeal, and give players more incentive to really master their moves.

Sadly, Floor Kids starts to go stale once you’ve collected all of the necessary moves and characters, and since you also can’t create your own character to perhaps incorporate other moves from other characters, that long term replay value is removed altogether. The game is truly awesome in its current state but it certainly needs more moves of its own to really maintain its flavor and overall flow. Hopefully, down the road, we may see some updates that incorporate character customization for example, if you defeat one opponent, you can ‘steal’ their move. That surely would’ve been awesome but unfortunately, it only lives on in our imaginations.

Once again, Floor Kids isn’t a bad game at all. In fact, it has all the right tools to become something great. However because the game lacks the fundamentals such as online battles or even something as simple as a high score ranking, it takes away so much of the appeal and leaves you feeling a little disappointed. The funky artstyle and dope beats are certainly a plus for the game since it adds a unique charm to it, but once you look past that it’s all the same. The gameplay promotes creativity and yet overall, the game itself could use more juice.

Floor Kids is like the perfect party game to have when you have a group of friends over, but when everyone leaves, then the game just feels empty. So we encourage you to pick this game up if you intend to have friends stop by and try something new. We would suggest anyone who enjoys dance titles to try it out as well, since much like me, the experience was still great despite some setbacks. Be sure to follow Honey’s on Twitter and Twitch to stay up to date about the latest gaming news, and of course when we go live with gaming action!

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