Review: In the Groove

Take the whole review with a grain of salt; I'm pregnant and not playing to the best of my ability.

Well, there are pros and cons.

Pros

It's a new dance pad game, with lots of songs I've never heard and steps I don't already know.

The choreography has a different feel to it than DDR. There are some combos and patterns I can't recall really seeing before very much. I assume this comes from having a different team of choreographers, which is more than fine by me.

The songs are longer, at least, I think they are. Their level 5-7 songs have between 230-280 steps in them, which seems a tad longer than your typical DDR song. For some, this would be a con, but sometimes the songs in DDR feel too short to me.

I like the timing on the sixteenth notes better in In the Groove than DDR. This is because I seem to hit them better in In the Groove. Since this is a personal characteristic, YMMV.

Finally, a dance game does what DDR should do in its next release. Color code the held steps. Don't make me guess whether I need to hit it with a quarter, eighth, or sixteenth timing. Just tell me by coding it appropriately. I don't know why DDR didn't do this from the beginning.

The backgrounds seem a lot less distracting so far. This could be because of a distinct lack of dancing bears and whatnot. Maybe I just haven't seen them yet, but I played about 30 songs and I don't remember seeing any.

The difficulty levels seem more advanced than DDR. Sevens are pretty darn hard. I only passed two of them on a sight read. However, I shouldn't really be doing sevens at the end of my first trimester, so perhaps my endurance is off. Lots of sixteenth patterns starting in the eights. This is a pro because I look forward to the challenge after I have the baby. More room to grow.

One word: mines. Neat addition. Every once in a while, they put a mine where an arrow should be and you lose life bar if you hit that arrow on that timing. It seems simple to avoid it, but the reflex to hit the direction if you see something on the screen is very strong after hours and hours of play. You really have to concentrate to avoid them, which is a good challenge.

Edit: Forgot to mention anything about the combos when I wrote this last night. ItG tracks combos across songs. If you end a song with a long combo and begin the next one, you continue the combo until you break it. I can't remember if the life bar started higher or not, though. It is neat to get really long combos and to be rewarded for being on a hot streak, so I like this.

Cons

LONG load/post-song times. I stared at a black TV monitor for long, long moments. This is a big, big drawback.

Songs aren't really memorable. Not, at least, to me. I turned off the game and found myself humming a DDR song that the last song I did reminded me of. Maybe I just know the DDR songs better, but none of the ItG songs really grabbed me.

The arrows are teeny tiny. Petite. The impolite way to say this is 'microscopic'. I have a hugemongous TV and my arrows were still tiny. Good luck playing on a smaller TV.

I found no way to bypass the credits after a set is done. This is tedious for the power ItG player. When I play, it's for 45 minutes to an hour. It sucks to make me go past your credit scroll six or seven times.

It is possible to avoid the pressing-start-past-the-credits issue if you play in workout mode, which is actually okay by me. I don't know about those calorie counts, though. I used to burn about 120 calories over a set of five DDR eight or nines. I did ItG workout mode (with an input of my weight, which should normalize the calorie counts) for fifteen minutes and it reported that I burned almost 500 calories. Considering that I only did about eight or nine songs in that time, it seems unlikely that both games are right. So, someone's wrong here, but I can't say which.

One word: hands. I am not a fan of this addition, but I do acknowledge that you can turn it off. ItG introduces three arrow combos, where you use both feet and one hand. I am not this coordinated, and I'm not sure that most home pads are up to it. I've tried to hit arrows with my hands when I was feeling cheeky in DDR, and it usually didn't register.

Edit: I originally forgot to mention the grading system. ItG uses some sort of Harry Potter OWLs grading system where A is some sort of middling grade. It keeps track of a percentage for you as you do the song, and then awards you a grade at the end which I assume is based off the percentage. I got an A+ with a high 80% score, and I thought, "WTF?" Then I did another song and had a 96.something percent, and got an S or an S+. S? What the heck does S stand for? "So good?" "S'alright?" Then I got a full combo on another song and got a star. I don't get it, and I don't think it's explained in the rulebook (although perhaps I missed it).

That's all I've got for the moment. I know there are a whole list of cons there, but all in all I'm happy with the game. At $40, it's an even better game than the list makes it appear. :)