Nipping on the coattails of the surging dancing/rhythm game trends, Mastiff has published Andamiro's Pump It Up franchise for the first time on home consoles. While the game was originally released on U.S. shores through a PC port of the Korean arcade dance hit about five years ago, the best-selling Dance Dance Revolution series by Konami gets yet another competitor on the Xbox and PlayStation 2 in Pump It Up: Exceed.
While the different format of dancing should give the casual player another healthy alternative, long-time players will notice the same game they played nearly two years ago. The most notable difference Pump It Up pushes in front of players is its obvious change in the dance pad layout. Instead of the standard DDR 90-degree arrow layout (left, up, down, right), Andamiro's dance layout is the complete reverse as every space that used to be metal on the DDR dance pad is now given a button.
The change puts arrows at 45-degree intervals from the player (upper-left, upper-right, lower-left, lower-right) and adds a fifth panel in the center of the pad. While the change and addition may seem like a cheap gimmick to make the game harder or to mimic an anti-DDR game, it proves to be a welcome change.
With the arrows surrounding you diagonally, dance motions become much more natural and your freedom of motion increases greatly, making Pump It Up more of a dancing game than its competition. With that in mind, Andamiro enlisted professional dancers to assist in choreographing the step charts for the songs in the game.
But other than that, Pump It Up: Exceed gives players pretty much the same experience as any other dancing game, which is extremely unfortunate because Pump It Up is a game that needed to be released along with the Dance Dance Revolution series in order to appreciate its originality.
Pump It Up integrated hold arrows, modifications and hi-res background videos before Dance Dance Revolution, but because it is making its way into the American market way too late into the trend, it ends up looking much more unoriginal and bland than it should.
Furthermore, while the game features around 100 dance tracks, aside from a mere handful of licensed U.S. tracks, Pump It Up: Exceed offers little to differentiate it from its original arcade release in 2004.
However, mentioning those shortcomings shouldn't detour dancing gamers from purchasing the title because Pump It Up: Exceed does offer up a solid experience. Unlike the copycat formula used in In the Groove by Roxor, the change in format provides a much different experience and while Pump It Up holds typical to any dancing game in the department of graphics, sound and control, the change in game play should be attractive to players who are looking for a change of pace or a bit of a challenge.
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