Dance Factory (PlayStation 2)

GameSpot editors' review

• CNET editors' rating: 2.0 stars Mediocre
  Detailed editors' rating
  Overall score: 4.3 (2.0 stars)

• Reviewed by:
  Jeff Gerstmann
• Reviewed on: 09/08/2006
• Released on: 08/29/2006
• Originally published on GameSpot: Dance Factory (PlayStation 2) Review

Dance Factory is a Dance Dance Revolution-like dancing game from Codemasters that puts you in control of the song list. Considering that, most of the time, you probably only ever like a handful of songs in any DDR release, adding support for music CDs seems smart. But Dance Factory's bad interface and poor beat-detection capabilities get in the way almost immediately.

There are only five songs that come on the Dance Factory disc, but the game relies on you inserting your own music CDs and dancing to those. The game's main feature is that it will "listen" to your CD and automatically generate dance steps. But the automatic generation relies on too many of the same step patterns over and over again. On top of that, the game has a hard time when it comes to figuring out the timing of those steps. While the steps might fall right on beat at the beginning of a song, over time they always seem to fall out of sync. You can get around this by making up your own steps for a song, but the entry method for the steps is to simply freestyle dance to the song. The steps you lay down are recorded and can be saved, but not edited. Some sort of graph-based step-creation mode that lets you plot out where each step should go would have made more sense.

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