dance dance revolution review
Dance Dance Revolution New MovesAs its name suggests, Dance Dance Revolution New Moves is trying to develop the famous Konami series on PS3 by allowing us to use the Playstation Move for the first time. A simple facelift of an aging formula or a real revolution on the dance floor? Answer in a few lines.
Also known as Dancing Stage, the Dance Dance Revolution (DDR) series made us sweat for more than 12 years on many gaming platforms as well as on various arcade machines. For its first appearance on Playstation 3, DDR now offers the luxury of taking into account upper body movements thanks to the ingenious Move remote control from Sony. Thus, not only, players will have to knit brushes on the traditional dance mat delivered with the software, but they will also have to wave their arms to follow the different choreographies offered in the new Move & Step game mode playable alone or in pairs. Concretely, it will be to point with the famous Sony device one of the four targets now appearing in the corners of the screen when new arrows oriented diagonally invite us. Instead of the usual four movements to reproduce, DDR New Moves' Move & Step mode therefore has eight.
Undoubtedly, the experience turns out to be rather fun at first. We see ourselves dancing in real time thanks to the camera and the light effects produced by the Move give a certain cachet to our choreographies. The detection of movements is correct and the additional arrows integrate well with the avalanche of instructions which scroll on the screen from bottom to top. Although only one hand is equipped with the Move, we are surprised to raise our arms or to lean throughout the song. The experience is certainly exhausting but it changes us. And when you think about it, DDR New Moves could even have excited us a year or two ago. Unfortunately, Microsoft and its great Kinect tool have been there in the meantime and the comparison is really tough. Regarding the global motion detection that we now have on Xbox 360, four arrows for the feet and four more for the arms, it's cheap. In addition, the targets placed far from us oblige us to change the remote control of hand several times by song. One would have thought that Konami was going to ask us to perform precise gestures at certain times by tracing beautiful arabesques in the air but that is not the case. In the end, the Move & Step mode is therefore an interesting experience but it remains relatively anecdotal compared to what is done today in dance.
For the rest, DDR New Moves is largely based on the well-known principles of the series. From the main menu, it is thus possible to access a Free mode or a very classic Battle mode in which it is enough to choose a song and one of the four levels of difficulty before starting to have fun. A Training section is there to allow us to improve and a store is available to buy songs online. A Club mode also allows us to dance on sequences of songs (between 4 and 20) knowing that the difficulty of the test is likely to vary in real time and that fairly vicious traps (accelerated speed, additional arrow ...) regularly try to trip us by occurring randomly. Well honed, the game mechanisms nevertheless feel more and more heated. Illustrated by visual effects that are as psychedelic as they are disappointing, the arrows-based choreographies no longer have much enthusiasm in 2011. The bulky dance floor, made up of two distinct layers that slide one over the other, seems completely obsolete and the precision of the steps suffers a lot.
In desperation, we would like to believe that the tracklist of this new episode of DDR on PS3 alone justifies its purchase; weary, it is not. On the one hand because it includes as always a majority of Konami remixes and on the other hand because the twenty or so pop hits available are enough to leave you wondering. Indeed, if we understand the presence of Bad Romance (Lady Gaga), Celebration (Kool & the Gang) or Venus (Bananarama) on the tracklist, we will really wonder why the developers also included titles as dancing as I ' m Yours (Jason Mraz), Battlefield (Jordin Sparks) or Love Like This (Natasha Bedingfield). Dancing on slows, or almost, is not really what you would expect from a new DDR. In fact, an in-depth overhaul of the series is clearly becoming urgent for Konami, on pain of seeing the sympathy capital of one of its large user-friendly licenses melt like snow in the sun in the coming years.
The notes
Graphics 11/20
The menus are austere and the visual effects that illustrate the clips are not always in the best taste. The Move & Step mode allows you to see yourself on the screen without any other device than a graphic filter and the light trails of the remote control.
Gameplay 12/20
The poorly designed dance floor serves the aging gameplay of this generally bland episode. The use of the Move is reduced to its simplest expression and as you can only use one remote control at a time, it is often necessary to pass it quickly from one hand to the other.
Lifespan 15/20
The 45 tracks on the blu-ray as well as the many play modes (solos or multi) available will keep us busy. It is also possible to buy additional songs or exchange videos.
Soundtrack 12/20
The remixes signed Konami lack originality while the choice of twenty pop titles sometimes leaves something to be desired. Some songs are dancing (According to You, Bad Romance, In the Zone ...). Others much less ... (Need you now, I'm Yours ...).
Scenario/
Between its disappointing tracklist, its badly designed dance floor and its old-fashioned gameplay, Dance Dance Revolution New Moves fails to relaunch a losing series. We will undoubtedly have a good time jiggling on certain songs, Move in hand, but overall the title lacks freshness.
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