Dance Factory Review

I think you've probably heard of the games that make you think you can dance when you're really just jumping around like a monkey on crack, the ones called Dance Dance Revolution. Well there's a new spin-off called Dance Factory and its main feature is that you can use your own music to dance.....

The good comes first. The biggest plus to this game is that you can use your own music of course, which should mean you have as much music as you want but sadly it doesn't really. The problem is about half of the music you use is not going to make good dances, either because the game can't do it right or it's just a bad song to dance to. So.. yeah.

Another plus to this game is that it has all of the basic game modes from DDR, but it has a new multiplayer one that hasn't been done before called Creature Mode. What happens in this is you put a CD in and (I bet you didn't know this) according to Konami, there are creatures in your CDs. So each CD will give you a different creature you can use for the mode, which is pretty cool. It's also cool that a creature can fit in a CD.. I wish I could do that. As far as the actual creatures go.. well.. they look like what you get when you let crocodiles operate on each other, the legs, arms, and neck are all gone. But somehow their hands, head, and feet are all mysteriously still in place. Funky. You get to buy your creature accessories in 3 different colors, and each one has a different ability aside from making your furry look like a rock star.

When you play in head-to-head with these creatures, if you get a certain number of arrows hit in a row, all of them will turn to the color of one of your pimp accessories. If you hit them all, something will happen like half of your opponent's arrows will go away for a bit. It's pretty cool, but the fact that every accessory only comes in 3 colors and they each do the same things kind of sucks. That's about all for the good...

Now for the bad.. and it's a doozie. First of all, the dance steps are off a lot of the time, it's kind of like they just throw arrows down no matter what the song. They also put a lot of the same combos in a lot. Also... it takes about a minute for the dance routines to be made. They did have the niceness to add in a 3D Tetris game for you to play while you wait.. but it's kind of hard to play when the arrows on your dance pad are hitting themselves like they do a lot. Nice thought though.

Then the second big problem with this game is the graphics... if you've ever put a grenade in a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and let it blow.. you know about how good these graphics look. Everything's bland and boring, the visualizations are stuck about 20 years in the past with lines all over the place (I will admit that a choice couple of them like the one in the pic below are awesome), the menus are boring, and the accessories for the creatures look like absolute crap. The arrows look pretty cool though.

The scoring in this game is messed up too, a lot of times you can't tell whether or not you hit an arrow or missed it. My last gripe about DF would have to be the lack of online, but that is very easy to forgive since there is no game disk in once you put your music in.

So.. overall Dance Factory has a lot of flaws, but they aren't too hard to forgive for the most part since it's running off of cache. I think there would a lot of potential for them to do a DF2 in the future on consoles with hard drives though, since they would have a lot more room for caching. I'll just go ahead and give it a 3.5 funky chicken monsters with floating body parts... out of 5, and tell you you should give it a go if you like casual DDR but not if you're really hardcore.