The streets aren't easy but they don't have to be mean, despite their reputation.  Fuse a little luck with a lot of skill plus a decent arsenal of fresh dance moves and things just might work out OK.  Floor Kids is the journey of what starts as a single dancer busting out their best skills on the streets, slowly growing a troupe until they've got enough of a reputation to be featured in a big-time show.  It's a cross-town trip with eight dancers showing off what they can do in 24 music tracks, moving to the beat in a smooth breakdance flow.

Starting off in a small studio, you pick a dancer to begin with and learn how the moves work.  There are four categories of move, with four options each, plus various tweaks and adjustments you can make to add variation to the routine.  Toprock are moves standing up, Down Rock is crouched, Power are spins, and Freeze involve striking a pose.  For Toprock and Down Rock you keep the beat by tapping a face button, with one button per move, while Power moves are done by either spinning the joystick left or right or doing the same while using a shoulder button.  Finally, Freezes are performed by moving the joystick and hitting a button, both pointed the same way- left and Y, down and B, etc.  Each move can segue into any other, and each character has four combos of three or four moves that score a nice bonus if you can learn how to string them together.  You can do fairly well just putting random moves one after the other, and a large part of the fun is seeing what kind of routine you can create.

You'll need to mix it up, though, because score is divided between the six categories of Funk, Flavor, Flow, Fire, and Flyness.  Funk is tapping out the moves to the beat, the Flavor bonus is for busting out new moves, Flow is about not falling while also doing a combo or two. Fire is given out by performing audience requests, where they shout out a category of move and you need to perform one before they give up, and Flyness is awarded for using advanced techniques like hops during a freeze or reversing the direction of a move.  At the end of the level you get a summary of how you did, or can get a full breakdown of how the score was calculated in fine detail.  Want to know how many times you amped up a Power move by speeding up the spin, or the number of Reversals on the Top/Down Rock moves?  It's all there contributing to your ranking.

Score translates into ranking, which is awarded by one to five crowns.  While it's nice for bragging rights and to feel good about pulling off a slick routine, pulling in the crowns also unlocks dancer cards if they happen to be watching from the crowd.  Unlocking a new dancer requires earning all four of their cards, and they don't open up unless you at least three-crown a song.  That's not too hard early on, but by the time you get to the fancier places like The Arcade you'll need to be tuned in to the flow of your dancers' moves, pulling off a few combos, tweaking moves constantly, and nailing the chorus to get a worthwhile score.  I found ranking decently on the early songs easy enough that I was getting complacent about learning technique, and pulling out a two-crown rank on the later levels the first indication that there was more to learn than I'd realized.

Each of Floor Kids' eight areas has three tracks to challenge, roughly two minutes apiece, and all original instrumental music by the DJ Kid Koala.  The flow of each song is identical, in that you get one minute to freestyle, a structured chorus, another minute of freestyling, and then the second round of the chorus closes out the track.  Continuing on with Floor Kids' obsession with the number four, the chorus has a section where you tap to the beat, another where you tap as quickly as possible, and then repeat those two steps again.  It's definitely a bit simple, but the tight structure makes a nice counterpoint to the freestyle dancing, and the beats get decently tricky as the game progresses.

Closing Comments:

Floor Kids is, at its core, Tony Hawk-style action where the beat is the rail and the dance moves string together into one long trick.  The art and animation are bursting with personality, and the character design is particularly excellent in that they've all got a solid sense of style without being over-designed.  The combination of the music and art make what would otherwise be a fairly simple score-chasing rhythm game pop off the screen, lively and energetic with its own unique style.  A training room to learn each character would have been nice, or at least a way to see the chosen character's individual move list off the pause menu, because going from House Shuffles to Hanger to High Flares only really works if you know what on earth that means.  Once you've got a character's moves down, though, it's a lot of fun to tear up the floor while exciting the crowd, changing up the style, pulling reversals, pulling different poses on a single dance step, and maxing out the song.  It's a big, busy city and standing out takes talent, but wild dance energy and street-honed skills are more than enough to fire up a crowd and take the kids farther than they'd have believed.