DS Review: Imagine Cheerleader

Keeping in step with the stereotypically female aspiration-inspired video games, Imagine has topped itself this time in trying to crank out another extremely girly video game. This time, they took on cheerleading.

...CHEERLEADING.

As you can imagine (pun intended), there isn't a whole lot somebody can do with this. If this didn't have the Imagine brand tied to it, I would be convinced that this was an absolute scraping-the-bottom-of-the-barrel budget to even produce this game in the first place. The graphics look both as though they were drawn in MS Paint and drawn in one of the shoddiest anime stylings I've seen in a long time. They have to distract the little girls from the terrible quality of this game with making sparkly fireworks explode any time they tap the bottom screen. Then you get into the actual gameplay...

All you end up doing is copying what the opposing cheerleading squad does. How this is supposed to lead you up through the ranks in "beating" the other squads, I don't know. But you either swipe your stylus up, down, left, or right....that's it. That's what you do the whole game, through every routine. Can you imagine just how quickly that gets old? Ugh. I kept waiting for the game to become fun, but it never happened. Thankfully, it only took about two hours, total, to complete the entire game. The only requiem you get from the monotony of the game is a small minigame you get to play a grand total of twice throughout the course of the game; a bake sale where you have to hurl your baked goods at your customers from a distance. ...It didn't really fit in with the rest of the game, but I guess they had to make some attempt at fleshing this out into a semi-playable game.

About the only thing I liked about this game, albeit predictable, were the Showgirls. VERY Broadway-esque, thus why I loved them. They should've belonged to dance troop rather than the cheerleaders, but that's neither here nor there. You can also purchase their dance styles (along with any of the other troops' dances as well), but I personally feel that you should just level up through the game and earn the dances with higher levels. Have it built in to simplify things, y'know? But the only drawback to that would've been that a.) it would have felt like that much less that you could do and b.) you'd lose that customizable quality to your troop to give it its own flavor. So I guess it's good and bad at the same time.

I feel that this game is really rather forgettable. It gets a measley 3 out of 10 pom-poms.