Common Sense Media Review
No-frills dancing game adds new step: Your music.
Parents Need to Know
Why Age 8+?
Any Positive Content?
Where to Play
What's It About?
In DANCE FACTORY, the song-loading functionality is at center stage -- and performs brilliantly. Pick any CD from your collection and let Dance Factory generate the collection of arrows that indicate when and where to step.
The real fun comes with raiding your music collection for wacky picks. Dancing to Jay-Z was predictably fun, but who would have thought the John Spencer Blues Explosion would make a great dance-pad match? Slow-grooving to Ravi Shankar was like doing tai chi, but the Squirrel Nut Zippers actually delivered a bit of swing. Your options are only as limited as your CD library.
Is It Any Good?
Dance Factory has a few minor bells and whistles: a basic fitness mode that counts calories, an endurance mode that lets players dance through an entire CD, and unlockable avatars called "creatures" that are lame and have no dance floor flair. The only real drawbacks to the game are its cheap presentation (visuals aren't much more than a glorified screensaver) and occasional badly generated dance. A dance editor solves the latter problem, but unfortunately you'll just have to dance your way through the low-rent package. In the end, you'll be boogying too hard to notice.
Talk to Your Kids About ...
Families can talk about the qualities that make a good dance song. Do you want to dance to a song just because it's popular -- or does it need to have a good groove? Families can experiment with different music. Kids might get a laugh at watching parents trying to dance to some blasts from the past.
Game Details
- Platform : PlayStation 2
- Pricing structure :
- Available online? : Not available online
- Publisher : Codemasters
- Release date : August 29, 2006
- Genre : Music & Dance
- ESRB rating :
- Last updated : August 25, 2016
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