As a noob DDRer, I thought this game was awesome!
The Bad: Extremely HARD!!
Review: Well, I'm super late on the DDR craze, lol. It looked too hard to do, looking at the master DDR kids in the arcade. But then my teacher brought hers to school in my graduate program one night, and I had a BLAST with it!! So then I figured, I could get one for my household, so me and my family can play any time. So when I got to Gamestop, the only bundle they were selling was this game, since it was the newest. They had a cheap 3rd party mat I could buy (along with any other DDR game disc), but the clerk recommended I get the bundle, because the official mat was much better. And I must say, the Konami mat seems very good.
So, I'm having just as much fun as I did when starting out. I just didn't realize it would take such hard work to become really good at this game. It is extremely hard. But still extremely fun. After about 10 hours of gameplay, I can beat most of the songs on the "basic" level (the 2nd one from the bottom, after the "beginner" level). There are very few songs I can play on the "difficult" level, the next one up. There are still like 3 difficulties past that, that I can't even touch yet, lol. It seems I'd have to practice for hours a day, everyday, for months to get that good. As a career and family man, I just don't have time, lol. But.... While my quest to become a DDR master is on the very back burner, this game is still a blast to play casually.
The first mode of play is like a quick play, where you can just pick a song, and play it. You can obviously adjust all the settings and stuff, pick your stage, character, difficulty level, etc.
The second mode is called the Hyper Master Mode, and is basically like a career mode. You go through dance stages, where it starts very easy, and gets gradually harder and harder as you go. Sometimes, the game throws you a curveball and gives you some crazy diifficult songs in the middle. Thats where youre "custom modules" come in. You can buy these from the game's shop, and they are basically cheats to help you beat a stage. Such as making the arrows come slower, or not penalizing you as much for missing an arrow, etc. Anyhoo, there are 11 stages in Hyper Master Mode, each with 5-8 song sections to complete, so it's very lengthy. It's goals for each song are different too, which mixes it up. Some songs it will give you the goal of stomping the "missing" arrow, so it'll give you 3 other arrows and you have to stomp on the missing one. That was terribly difficult for me, lol. Some songs you have to get high combos, others, just a high score, others a certain accuracy percentage. This mode does a pretty good job of getting gradually harder and forcing you to up your skills as you progress. However, since it takes ALOT of practice to increase your skills, you can get stuck in a certain stage for awhile. I do anyway. :-) And as usual, the more you play through this mode, the more songs, stages, cheats/challenges, etc you can unlock to play in the free play mode.
The game also includes and Advanced Mode, for advanced dancers, and I haven't touched it yet, lol.
It also has an online mode, which I haven't played yet. Waiting for my ethernet cable to come in the mail.
And it has a few other modes, none worth mentioning or playing though. Well, a brief mention I suppose. A Workout mode, which counts your calories as you play. A Tutorial mode, that shows you a very basic tutorial video. A Training mode, that lets you practice the songs without a score or stage. And a Edit Mode, where you can make your own dance routine.
So while GS gave this a pretty low score, mostly due to it being recycled from the previous games, it even said it's not a bad game, and hasn't actually gotten "worse" than the previous games. Since is my first DDR experience, I was pretty blown away by it. So if you're looking for a good DDR game, I reckon this, or any of the DDR franchise games will do. If you're already a DDR master, you're only advantage to getting this game would be the new song list, which has over 70 songs on it. And I like pretty much 90% of em. That's all for now, enjoy.