Review: Grease DS
When I heard that 505 Games had licensed Grease for videogames, I was super excited to see what they had in store, but upon seeing the games at E3, I was underwhelmed by the Wii version, but intrigued by the DS one. With Elite Beat Agents-style gameplay set to songs like "Hand Jive" and "Greased Lightning," how could it miss? Well, turns out that while Grease for the DS doesn't exactly miss, it ends up falling flat.
There's a Story Mode where you select Danny or Sandy, and play through their side of the storyline song by song. You tap stars in time with the music, rapid-tap large stars that count down from 100, and follow little stars along various shapes like stars, hearts and lines. A Quick Play mode allows you to pick either character (plus Frenchie and Rizzo), customize their outfits and play a song of your choice. But that's about it. And Story Mode doesn't even last for half of the movie. They clearly tried to add some extra value with the Lyrics & Music and Dance Steps Modes, but that's not gameplay, and is ultimately useless. It's no fun singing along to the songs without being scored, and learning choreography on the DS is just weird. There's also a multiplayer mode, but while it's nice only one game card is required, allowing you a choice of character but not song ("Greased Lightning" was automatically selected) is pretty weak.
Though the instruction booklet has some movie stills in it, graphics are cartoony, avoiding any licensing issues with likenesses. The comic book-style still screens before each stage aren't great, but the motion-captured dancing animation is surprisingly good. (There's also a feature where you can use the DSi camera to superimpose your own face onto one of the characters, but it looks really creepy, so the less said about it, the better!) The songs sound great, and while they're covers (again to keep licensing costs down), they're really good covers. The only problem is that there aren't very many of them, and some of them are really heavily censored. Obviously you're going to cut the dirty words out of "Greased Lightning" to keep the ESRB rating low, but they also did a number on "Sandra Dee." Censoring "cigarette" is borderline, but deleting "bed" from "Won't go to bed 'til I'm legally wed" seems a bit extreme. All the blank lyrics are kind of distracting and make them sound like hardcore rap songs played on the radio.
Grease on the DS isn't terrible. The songs are awesome, as everyone knows, and the tap and swipe gameplay is fun. But unfortunately, there's really not a lot of game to be had. While difficulty ramps up as the story progresses so that by the time you get to "We Go Together" you might fail out a couple times, the game as a whole isn't that hard. And offering three difficulty levels in Quick Play gives a little bit of replayability, but it's not much. The gimped multiplayer doesn't add much, either. I was able to unlock Frenchie and "Beauty School Dropout," but there isn't anything else to find (although I think "There Are Worse Things I Could Do" is in there somewhere...). I don't regret playing Grease, and I will probably go back to it periodically just for a bit of fun, but I'm glad I had a gift card and only paid $5 for it.
