High School Musical 2: Work This Out

Release Date: April 15, 2008

High School Musical 2: Work This Out Review

It didn't take long to work out how much this sucks.

I am only moderately ashamed to say that I have seen both High School Musical films numerous times. I realize that this revelation makes me seem like the biggest loser in the office, an opinion that is pretty easy to argue for. However, this also makes me justified to accurately review a High School Musical game, despite being the wrong demographic in both age and gender. As the office's only expert on the singing and dancing adventures of the East High Wildcats, I can honestly say that High School Musical 2: Work This Out is pretty freaking awful.

The approximately 8 trillion kids that bought the first High School Musical game might expect Work This Out to be another Elite Beat Agents style rhythm game featuring their favorite songs from the hit Disney Channel Original Movie. For some reason A2M didn't take the same formula that made the first game work and instead decided to change every aspect of the game to look and play worse. Oh, and they spaced out the only decent parts of the game with annoying fetch quests and crappy minigames.

Work This Out attempts to follow the plot of the second film. The East High gang are at Lava Springs Resort, pursuing summer jobs. Sharpay, being the total beeyotch that she is, ditches her twin brother to pursue Troy, and creates a rift between the group of friends. If you've never seen the movie you won't really get that from the game since the story is so poorly conveyed. Every so often some talking heads will appear to display lines from the film, with no context. No major plot points are ever revealed, just the dialogue that reacts to it, so unless you're a huge HSM fan, everyone just seems insane.

The job duties are represented by four minigames, all of which are terrible in their own way. The focus is to complete the tasks on the beat of the music. Three of the games involve dragging things with the stylus (in two of the cases, picking up balls, both golf and basketball). So what I meant to say is there are two terrible minigames that pretend to be four. The whole "do it to the beat" thing would be fine if it weren't so restricting. It completely limits how often you can make a move, and in games like the golf ball collection or basketball practice the player is forced to lose points because there isn't enough time to grab everything. Every minigame lasts far longer than it should, and as new rules are added to them they just become more tiring to play. None of them are hard to beat at all, and we found it hard not to score at least three times the required amount, but the entire experience was torture. The sandwich making game alone is most likely what Hell would be for me. Just that minigame, with a timer set to infinity.

Remember that part in the movie where they had to make sandwiches over and over? Me neither.

When the Wildcats aren't doing tedious kitchen tasks, they're completing fetch quests for the guests around the maze-like resort. While you're clumsily bumping around due to the poor controls, you're serenaded with the songs from High School Musical 2 that you've unlocked. The need for unlocking them is an important fact here, since the game starts off with only two songs. And they're just different versions of the same song. I don't care how much you like HSM2, hearing "You are the Music in Me" repeatedly for hours on end is a torture normally reserved for Manuel Noriega.

And you know what? The soundtrack to High School Musical 2 sucks. It's just nowhere near as good as the first film's, and the two best songs were already included in the previous game. By the time the game was done I had heard the soundtrack, in whole or parts, dozens of times. There are only 10 songs, but it takes hours to get even five songs, so if you were hoping to hear a favorite from later in the movie, you're out of luck until the game is almost over.

The bread and butter of the game are the rhythm minigames. Like the previous game each song in HSM2 has an Elite Beat Agents style level where players tap circles to the beat of the music. The presentation has been changed this time. Instead of having two characters dancing on the top screen while the player taps on the bottom screen, both the character and the gameplay are crammed onto the bottom screen while the top displays the score. The minigame plays out decently enough, except that it's been reduced to only tapping circles. There aren't any line tracing interruptions or freethrow shooting tangents. The whole things feels very stale and hollow, especially since it had been done better fairly recently.

There is a neat little jukebox feature in the game that allows the player to listen to the soundtrack songs through headphones with the DS closed. The problem is you can only listen to songs you've unlocked, so by the time the feature becomes functional, you've heard the songs enough times to recite them word for word until you die.

The Verdict

Seriously, what the crap Disney and A2M? You already made a High School Musical game that wasn't terrible. It wasn't great, but it was fun enough for kids and had a lot of appeal for fans of the movie. How did you manage to screw up the sequel so bad? The sad thing is that it seems like it took more work to make this game so clunky, boring, poor looking and tedious. The fact that the original soundtrack is infinitely superior is reason enough to buy the first game over this embarrassing sequel, plus you also don't have to suffer through horrible sandwich making minigames.

IGN Ratings for High School Musical 2: Work This Out (NDS)
The story is barely told through talking heads. An insult to fans and confusing to newcomers.
The 3D characters move awkwardly and jerk around while they dance. The movements aren't affected by how well we do.
Having a soundtrack of 10 songs would be cool if they weren't mediocre and played so much we wanted to stick pencils in our ears. The worst part is that the music has to stay on to play the game.
The clunky controls are infuriating, which makes doing the fetch quests a chore. The minigames are too similar to each other, and they suck. The rhythm games are the best part of the game.
Lasting Appeal
The week of story mode is not very long, but it takes too long to unlock all the jukebox songs, which makes the feature useless.
(out of 10, not an average)
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Game Details

Published by: Buena Vista Games
Genre: Music
Release Date:
United States: April 15, 2008
Australia: May 29, 2008
MSRP: 29.99 USD
Also Available On: