Dance Factory for PlayStation 2 Reviews & Ratings by IGN

No matter how glorious any rhythm game may be, the soundtrack is just never good enough. Any set of songs will be missing hundreds or thousands of other tracks that you'd want to include. Dance Factory sets to bust that model wide open by allowing any song to be imported for your own living room fast-stepping hijinks. But without any sense of design to the step patterns, Dance Factory ends up being less fun than, say, just dancing in your own room to your own music and that's its fatal flaw.



Dance Factory has a whopping five songs on the disc, but these are just an introduction to the magic of using your own tunes. And by magic, I mean that you put in a disc to be processed to create step patterns and wait a minute for one song or maybe 10 for a whole album. Of course, these can be saved to a memory card so that you can skip this fantastically unfantastic process again. Now you can dance to some custom footwork for The Hives, Man or Astroman, or Vivaldi and rock out.



The fun of playing a rhythm game is not nearly just the music, but also the difficult patterns to work through. It's easy to obsess over a particularly tricky piece of a song just so you can get it perfectly. But since everything is left up to some mysterious algorithm this feeling is completely lost. Instead of getting into the groove and jumping on the mat at the loud or boisterous parts of the song, the program has only occasional moments of brilliance, but this might be an accident. Designers of clever step patterns are recognized for their efforts and just a couple of minutes with Dance Factory will show you exactly why. So as far as any complicated sections to dive into? Forget about it.



Dance Factory features three different levels of difficulty and none of them will have any appeal for hardcore DDR fans. The medium setting can be easily passed without having to pay attention to the screen too much. The hardest setting is fast and can build up a sweat, but it's nowhere near the ferocious songs seen in many other games. And without those interesting bits in there the hardest level is really just about moving faster without getting any more fun. It's pretty obvious that the appeal is to put in your own music and goof off with your friends for a few minutes before you move onto something better.



There are other features to be found in Dance Factory, but they don't add much more to the experience. You can earn points to purchase more screensaver-tastic backgrounds and you can create your custom creature to dance around in the background to help cheer you on and make you think you're having more fun than you really are. There's even an EyeToy feature, but the less said about that the better. No matter what, the core is the dancing experience and these features can't hide the fact that it's lacking.

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