Practice Your Cheering Skills For That Next Big Game Music Concert: We Cheer Review

Yep, believe it, we’re covering this. I was thinking what most of you out there are thinking when I first saw this game, and that is that this must be another sorry attempt at a rhythm game on the Wii, but this time aimed at young girls. While I can’t deny that the game is aimed at girls (duh!), I have to admit that We Cheer offers some great ideas and a decent song list if you can get over the fact that you’ll be taking up cheerleading in your living room.

So, am I saying We Cheer is a great game? There are some serious flaws with We Cheer involving the motion controls, but when the game wants to recognize your movements, it is strangely rewarding… and yeah, feel free to laugh if you want. It’s time to bust out those pom-poms and learn a lesson in cheerleading.

Read the verdict after the jump.

I’ll start by saying We Cheer is appropriately simple. Championship mode is the meat of the game, while there are a couple other options for a multiplayer, practice, and workout mode which keeps tracks of the calories you burn while you play (and you’ll burn them, trust me). You’re not going to get bogged down with endless options and complicated gameplay modes with We Cheer.

When choosing Championship mode, you’ll select your cheerleader’s appearance and jump right into the game. You can visit different venues that each have their own unique song list, and upon completing the songs offered, you’ll unlock other venues and more songs. At the beginning of each routine you are greeted by a cheerleader who will offer to join your squad if you’re able to complete the routine successfully, and for some unexplained reason, they’ll also bestow new uniforms and other gifts to your team upon joining.

As far as the gameplay is concerned, you’ll be using two Wii remotes to follow the movements on the screen that are marked by red lines for the right hand and blue lines for the left hand. Each track features unique choreography that is actually well thought out and a lot of fun, but the motion detection in We Cheer is simply disastrous to put it nicely. You’ll find the game highly rewarding when it’s actually working, but some movements simply don’t register correctly no matter how many times you try, making for a frustrating experience.

This is especially problematic given the brutal pass/fail line for the various routines. As you perform moves correctly, you fill a megaphone-shaped meter at the bottom of the screen which must be completely filled to complete the song. This often requires that you perform almost flawlessly, and strangely enough, a given song’s difficulty is completely independent of the actual difficulty rating of the song. The reason for this is that the “difficult” songs tend to have more robust routines that give you more opportunities to rack up the necessary points to pass the stage, making them easier than the “easy” routines that have fewer moves. This clearly demonstrates how broken the gameplay is, which is quite a shame as there’s a lot of potential here.

To make matters worse, you cannot restart a song midway through even if you mess up, and you can’t even pause the game while a song is in progress. While this lets those who mess up early on practice the remainder of the routine, it’s annoying when you’re trying to unlock more venues and songs. Finally, the load times between attempts are horrendous, as you have to sit through multiple screens before being able to retry the song. And this is on We Cheer’s normal difficulty! Way to destroy my self-esteem, Namco Bandai!

So, how about the song list? It’s actually surprisingly good! There are thirty tracks in the game, and despite the target audience being young girls, I found a lot to like. “If You’re Gonna Jump (Paul Okaenfold Remix)” by Natasha Bedingfield and “Perfect Day” by Hoku were pleasant surprises, and BT’s “Godspeed” and “Eye of the Tiger (Sunset Crew Radio Mix)” by Crew 7 were tracks that appealed to me right from the start. Even acts like The Ataris and Plain White T’s are featured. There are a number of other tracks that I enjoyed, and there wasn’t anything that I found intolerable (not even the Hilary Duff track!).

The bottom line is that while the gameplay concept and song list are good, the controls make the game a frustrating mess. It’s a shame, because the game has a lot of potential. Perhaps this is a game that should have waited for the Wii MotionPlus, but unfortunately it’s here now, and I can’t imagine even a young girl enjoying this game very long with these disabling problems. Then again, maybe I’m just a crappy cheerleader… right? That must be it!

So, can you picture yourself getting into a game focused on cheerleading? Are you at all surprised by some of the tracks featured in We Cheer?