Pump It Up: Exceed
Tired of DDR? A new, more complex alternative awaits…
Tags: Pump It Up: Exceed Categories: PS2 Reviews, Reviews
Posted by Craig "American Idle" Hansen on Oct 11th, 2005
| Title | Players | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Pump It Up: Exceed (title page) | 1 - 2 | ||
| Developer | Publisher | Genre | Online |
| Music/Rhythm | No | ||
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While dancing games are a minor genre in the US, those who use them to exercise really appreciate them and the major standard-setter has been the series Dance Dance Revolution. With its four-button dance pad design, the game has inspired a lot of weak clones but few that actually improve upon DDR’s basic formula. Enter developer Andamiro, who has been evolving its own Pump It Up series in Korea for nearly as long as DDR. Pump It Up: Exceed, however, is the first iteration of the series to actually make it across the ocean to U.S. shores.
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The big revolutionary step taken by Pump It Up: Exceed is that it adds a fifth button in the center of the dance pad, allowing for more combinations and steps; also, in a separate mode, there is support for either two-player, two-pad dancing or one-player, two-pad dancing, which really increased the level of challenge. The improved dance-pad controller design also has the benefit of keeping your body positioned so you can see the screen clearly at all times, rather than craning your neck, which is not the case with DDR.
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The box boasts that Pump It Up: Exceed is “the first game that actually requires you to dance, not just step.” That’s somewhat debatable, although the choreography of the title does tend to look more like dancing when performed by a skilled dance-step game veteran. Fortunately, Pump It Up: Exceed comes with one dance-mat prepackaged and included in the $60 retail box; you can get a second one separately, if that’s your thing. This is an improvement over DDR, which primarily relies on third-party dance mats these days.
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It should be noted that PIU:E is not an easy game to master. The two primary modes are home and arcade. In arcade mode, if you miss too many steps, it’s “game over.” Home mode is more forgiving, simply giving out a lower score or rating, but allowing the song to play on no matter how many steps you miss. Unfortunately, most of the game’s 101 songs are locked into arcade mode and to use them in home mode, you have to “clear” the song in arcade mode first; this isn’t easy and almost defeats the purpose of home mode, which potentially could have been used as a “practice mode” for the challenge of the arcade mode. It’s an unfortunate oversight that may discourage those who are not great dancers, or at least who are out of shape and unable to easily clear songs into home mode; if you use a game like this to work out, having only a small number of songs available in home mode can make the whole affair quickly grow monotonous, especially if you’re simply out of your depth in arcade mode.
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Most of the songs included have high youth appeal, falling into the rap, techno and house music categories; there’s no “Boot Scooting Boogie” to be found here for country music fans. This is complicated by the fact that much of the dance choreography is designed for its challenge, rather than to match the music; with a few exceptions, your dance moves won’t really correspond with the song, which makes that “really makes you dance instead of just step” boast on the box ring kind of hollow.
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The game does offer varying levels of difficulty for each song, and the higher levels can get pretty wild; if you’re more than 50 pounds overweight or over 50 years of age, you might want to leave those upper difficulty levels for the more svelte, youthful members of your family. That said, games like this do exist to provide a challenge, and with no less than 20 levels of difficulty per song and 101 songs to master, that’s 2,020 levels to keep a person busy, which is plenty of depth for a workout/dance game of this type. If you’re a veteran of the DDR games, Pump It Up: Exceed provides a viable alternative and plenty of new challenges; if you’re looking to shed a few pounds, however, it may be best to find a less challenging game straight out of the gate; this is not a first-timer-friendly dance-step game.
| What Works | Score |
|---|---|
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+ Deep list of songs. + Fifth step-button on pad, and two-pad mode, add a new level of challenge to DDR formula. + Plenty of levels of challenge: 20 difficulty levels x 101 songs equals 2,020 challenges! |
6.9 |
| What Doesn't | |
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— Not very newcomer-friendly, in terms of challenge-level. — Too many songs locked into arcade mode and unavailable in home mode until you "clear" them in arcade. — Few of the choreographies actually match up to the music. — A little more variety in music styles, to appeal to more age groups as well as the US audience, could’ve helped. |
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| Under the Shrink-wrap | |
| Adding a fifth button and a two-dance pad mode, Pump It Up: Exceed offers new challenges and plenty of depth, the first game to really improve on the DDR formula for dance-step games. | |
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Tags: Pump It Up: Exceed
Posted by Craig "American Idle" Hansen on Oct 11th, 2005 and is filed under PS2 Reviews, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.
