Them Dancin’ Feets Become Dancing Fingers with Pump It Up Rise Steam Release
When music games first hit, they landed hard. Starting from Parappa the Rapper it didn’t take more than a couple (literally two) years for Dance Dance Revolution to come along and, a year later, the South Korean take on music/dancing in the form of Pump it Up. Primarily an arcade game, it stayed in South Korea barring a single console release in the form of Pump It Up Exceed, and then it disappeared for anyone who wasn’t following the arcade music scene. You might have run across a machine at Round One or Dave & Buster’s, but otherwise despite the series still seeing regular annual releases it was gone from a large chunk of the world. Granted, there’s an entirely different article to be written about music games that are arcade-only, thanks to unique control schemes that would require peripherals too expensive to justify the conversion to home usage, but the point is that despite Pump It Up being an ongoing success it was limited to arcades, right up until today’s Early Access Steam release of Pump It Up Rise.
A Few Slight Revisions On the Way Home
Pump It Up Rise is the latest game in the series and, it’s important to note, the first one not designed for a dance mat. The games have always up until now used a pad similar to the DDR one, except with arrows at the corners plus a center button, rather than DDR’s up/down/left/right. It gave the series its own flow to the dancing, keeping Pump It Up’s feel different enough from Dance Dance Revolution’s to avoid too much in the way of legal arguments. The new version, however, is designed for home usage and this means keyboards and controllers. The note charts are revised to reflect this, and while you can use input mapping to work with a dance pad the jury is still out as to how well the new arrow patterns will work, so it’s best to go in expecting to use a controller.
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Still, once you’ve got expectations calibrated Pump It Up Rise is off to a content-packed start. Kicking off with two hundred songs, each of which have multiple note charts tuned for difficulty level plus five or six key modes, there’s a lot of music to find the beat to. The soundtrack is a mix of series classics and popular tunes from the latest arcade editions, all remapped for this version. Early Access plans are to add even more tracks over time, divided between core game upgrades plus DLC, with the target library size being around four hundred or more songs. The one disclaimer is that there’s currently no information on how many songs are free updates versus DLC, but even so it’s hard to complain about a two hundred song library.
A little easier to complain about, though, is the always-online requirement. If the connection drops the song is over, which isn’t a feature that’s going to endear the game to its target Steam player-base. That’s a “proceed with caution” issue, but it’s also worth noting this is Day One of Early Access. It would be nice to think that a standard usability feature like not kicking the player out of the round due to an imperfect internet connection or overloaded server will be added in future updates, but we’ll have to see how that goes. And as long as we’re wishing for things, note charts optimized for dance mats would be nice to have too. It’s a bit of a rocky launch for Pump It Up Rise, but for music fans wanting to finally bring the series home for the first time since the PS2 days it’s well worth keeping an eye on.
