Reviews – High School Musical 3: Senior Year (DS)

By most accounts, High School Musical 3: Senior Year is a critical and commercial success. Could the same thing be said for Nintendo DS game of the same name? If one is familiar with the history of film-licensed video games, the chances of having a good tie-in aren’t very encouraging. Does High School Musical 3: Senior Year buck that trend?

The short answer is no, but it’s not because the game is horrible. On the contrary, Senior Year features a handful of easy-yet-mildly-enjoyable minigames. The main one involves pointing a conical “melody line” in the direction of streaming notes while simultaneously pressing the directional button in time to the music’s beat. Another is rotating a multi-colored flower and matching colored dots, while another requires touching a sequence of dropping balls in time to the rhythm.

There are also trivia-based quizzes that is said to determine a player’s personality based on characters from High School Musical. When everything is finished and unlocked, one can listen to an in-game jukebox that plays the movie’s catchy songs.

It’s all easy enough to play even at the highest difficulty setting. Unfortunately, everything can be accomplished in one sitting—this includes the unlockables for the yearbook filled with pictures and quotes of the musical’s cast. The main culprit of the game’s short playthrough is the lack of minigames—there are only four. The quizzes hardly qualify as minigames and there are only two possible outcomes for the answers.

The multiplayer is limited to “BFF” quizzes among friends, while DGamer (think Home for the DS), an online community of Disney gamers, is awfully difficult to access via the website or the DS itself.

For what it’s worth, the game’s jukebox is quite fun to listen to, though the sound quality could have been better. However, given the hardware limitations, cramming all the tracks and the entire game in one DS cartridge is still pretty impressive.

High School Musical 3: Senior Year could only last slightly longer than its cinematic counterpart, which is quite a shame, considering that the core gameplay in this DS installment is mildly entertaining. The game is aimed at the movie’s legion of fans, which would surely go appreciate and finish Senior Year in no time. Despite its charm, this film-licensed video game is hard to recommend because of its length.

4/10

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