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Of course, despite the ridiculous difficulty and hardcore appeal, it's main draw should be it's musical offerings. Again, this is a point of fault towards In the Groove. Boasting over 70 songs, you'd think that aside from a couple of keepers the game would feature more than cheesy eurotrash pop and blatantly generic techno music that sounds like your friends FruityLoops creation.
Almost more offensive are the songs that serve nothing more than to convince you that you're playing a game of the caliber that is Dance Dance Revolution. Compare In the Groove's "The Game" to DDR's "Typical Tropical", or "Pandemonium" to DDR's own "Max 300" and you'll start to notice some eerie similarities. Adding more to the leeching are songs that even appeared on DDR to begin with in the form of E-Rotic's "Turn Me On" and Vanillia Ninja's "Tough Enough".
Other problems with In the Groove, while adding to an overall lack of polish to the final product aren't much a concern in the genre of music games. The overall ghetto appearance of the interface and background graphics, while not pleasing to the eyes hardly detract from the experience. The load times are also a bit suspect, especially considering that you rarely, if ever see a loading screen in big brother Revolution.
In the Groove sets out to and does accomplish everything it wants to. Hardcore dancing fanatics will be stomping for months to come as they work on those level 12 difficulty songs while training for the recently announced In the Groove 2, not giving a second thought to it's average appearance and musical selections. Meanwhile, newcomers to the genre are much better off picking up Dance Dance Revolution for it's more well-rounded experience in terms of difficulty and musical variety. In the Groove isn't a bad game by any means, but not quite the revolution some may have hoped for. |
