Flow: Urban Dance Uprising

"Another poor knockoff"

Graphics: 6/10

The backgrounds on FLOW are reasonably attractive. The dancer in the background is fairly detailed and moves fluidly and it has reasonable number of venues for your dancer to choose from. The target arrows, while simple, remain fairly effective. The graphics for the arrows themselves are dull and bland using shades of black and brown to designate the type of note (quarter note, eight note, etc).

Sound: 7/10

The game promises lots of hip-hop music and it manages to deliver. I admit i'm not much of a fan of the genre, however, there seems to be a decent selection of music and should have something to please any fan.

Gameplay: 1/10

This is where FLOW truly and spectacularly fails. The game has flaws obvious to any fan of dance and rhythm games. Most notably is the poor quality of the steps themselves; they match with the music very poorly, leaving you feeling like you're "dancing" to an entirely different song.

Another notable omission is arrow modifiers. Most rhythms games include a host of modifiers to make the arrows scroll faster, slower, bounce around the screen, or even chance the steps themselves. FLOW has absolutely NONE of these modifiers, a problem aggrivated by the very slow scroll rate of the arrows (Most songs aren't much faster then 100bpm); this is sure to frustrate veteran rhythm game fans.

The overall difficulty of the game is lacking compared to what can be found in Dance Dance Revolution and In the Groove. FLOW displays a songs difficulty with a series of 1-5 bars, 1 being easiest and 5 being the hardest. A 5 in FLOW is roughly equivilent to a 7, maybe an 8, in DDR and ITG.

To unlock new dancers, songs, and venues, you must complete varios challanges the game lays out for you, such as surpassing a certain score, ot not missing more than a certian number of arrows, similar to DDR Extreme 2's Dance Master mode. Personally, and I believe many in the rhythm game community agree, I don't like this method of unlocks as the challanges can get boring quickly and would perfer a method based on the number of songs played. That is, of course, a preferance so I can't really hold it against the game.

Overall: 3/10

Despite the acceptable music and graphics I cannot recommend this game to either beginner or veteran dance sim players. It's overall lack of basic features and poor stepchart design make this a forgettable game not worth your purchase.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 08/18/06