xbox live indie game reviews

Dokee and the Musical Rain was actually one of the very first community games I ever bought.  Well, I should say it was one of the first games I "paid" for. I was making myself lunch while my new puppy was happily chewing on the controller and buying this game. In the months since (while putting off actually writing the review), I've told the story several times of how Pixel (my dog) bought the game--every time using Dokee as an example of how bad community games can be.

Dokee and the Musical Rain is a 2D game with 3D graphics--gameplay takes place on a flat tableau in front of a 3D scene. The character models and environment are cute enough, but the animations are laughable. The whole game feels as if it's being played underwater, with all the movement feeling just ridiculously slow. You move Dokee back and forth across the screen, with four moves at your disposal. Each move is a jump/dance of some sort, but it makes no difference at all which one you choose.

Spinning music boxes drop from the sky, and collecting one adds it to the background music. If you miss one (you won't--they're stupid easy to grab), you lose that instrument. When the background track is complete (all instruments accounted for), the level ends and you're "treated" to Dokee dancing for around 30 seconds while the camera slowly pans out and the most annoying music in the game loops a half-dozen times or so. A couple of powerups make what's already easy even easier--a bone doubles your size, wings let you fly (and apply a bizarre sketch filter), and a bat allows you to jump really high (and makes the level go black and white).

The soundtrack is awful--each level is made up of a variety of sound loops from random sources (helicopters? frogs? what?) mashed together without much thought put to whether they actually sound good together. Each loop mostly sounds like the "demo" loop you'd expect to hear on a cheap electric keyboard from WalMart. In case you can't get enough of the music in-game, there's an extra "minigame" which allows you to add and remove loops at will. That's it. That's the "game."

Besides not being very fun to play, the game is riddled with technical problems. If you pause the game, the music fades out and doesn't come back until you unpause and grab a new box. While Dokee is doing his victory dance (standing in place), you're free to slide hime left and right. When the camera zooms out, it often "pulls" Dokee with it, resulting in bizarre instances of him ghosting through terrain. Even though the game was purchased, the "Please Buy My Game I Know It's Bad But I'll Donate Money To Kids" (I'm paraphrasing, but only just) message option remains on the main screen. All the menus and confirmation dialogues are lifted straight from the XNA site's tutorials, without even bothering to swap out the background gradients.

Dokee and the Musical Rain is geared towards young children, but that doesn't excuse its flaws. I haven't tested the theory, but I'd imagine kids would be even less impressed than me--for the most part, children aren't stupid (as this game assumes they are). All but four of the levels are available in the trial mode, so I encourage anyone to download it and see how bad it really is... just make sure your dog's not around or you may end up wasting 400 points on a crappy game.