Frogger: Beats & Bounces

Spend a Friday or Saturday night out in the bars or clubs of almost any provincial town in the UK, and you'll come across scores of men and women who should really know better. Heading towards their forties and squeezed into outfits that would barely fit a toddler, these people routinely stampede towards the dancefloor in their local Chicago Rock, busting their moves to a Meat Loaf classic. While the DJ plays Abba.

Yes, if excursions such as these prove anything, it's that a startling number of us have absolutely no sense of rhythm. You might expect, then, that a game designed to test that very same sense of rhythm (or lack thereof) would be a veritable expert by comparison, making use of the technology at its fingertips to deliver a precision-based package.

Those expecting that of Frogger: Beats & Bounces will be very disappointed indeed; in the world of games, Beats & Bounces loafs around on the dancefloor like the rest of us.

The premise is a simple one; your job is to guide Frogger through numerous maps on his way to Toadstein's castle to break a spell that's causing him to move only in time with a beat. With each map scrolling down from top to bottom, you have to direct Frogger left and right to avoid oncoming objects as he leaps forward with every hit of the drum.

In keeping with the musical theme, however, the game only lets you press left or right in time with the music. Frogger can also eat insects by lashing out his tongue – but, again, only if performed within the song's rhythm. Konami has made it incredibly easy to control all such movements – every button on the left of your keypad ('1', '4', '7' and '*', for instance) will direct Frogger to the left, with the same being true of the buttons on the right, which, naturally, send him right. To pick up food, all you need do is tap the '5' key.

The problem is, for a game that so relies on having a good sense of rhythm, Beats & Bounces's own sense is absolutely awful. Things start off fairly well, with each level's ditty matching in time with flashes on the screen designed to signify just where and when the beat is for those who can't make it out in the music alone. However, each tune is in fact on a very short loop, and there's a slight moment of musical pause in between each restart, meaning the music gradually gets further and further out of step with the beat pulsing on screen.

In reality, there's only a very slight difference between the two, and Konami has deliberately complicated the issue by switching between the main beat and the beat in between the main beat (are you still with me?), but the game's own lack of rhythm means that play soon becomes a case of battling your urge to tap along with the music you're hearing rather than the beat the game wants you to keep, flashing on screen.

It's surely a very slight misstep during development, but one that hampers what is otherwise a very neat, accessible game. Each successful leap forward, left and right earns 10 points, while eating the game's range of insects along the way also adds to the score at the end of each round. The object, therefore, like most arcade titles, is to better your own score on each level, and with three difficulty settings, there's ample scope for replay.

But Frogger: Beats & Bounces's obtuse and overt lack of rhythm severely damages its appeal, and means you're more likely to be throwing your phone across the room in anger than jumping in time with the beat.