Hello again Time Wasters!
This week I’m taking a look at a game that’s a bit different from the ones I normally play. Anyone who’s played DDR (Dance Dance Revolution) will know exactly what this game is like; especially if you’re one of those people who play DDR with a controller. Anyone who hasn’t played DDR, I hope you might at least know what it is.
Flash Flash Revolution is pretty much DDR, except it’s for your fingers. Using the arrow keys (though you can switch which keys you use, the arrows are just the default) you have to hit the right arrow in coordinates with the right arrow-symbol shown. Hit the correct ones and make it through the song to win. Miss too many, and you lose. Of course you have to worry about hitting button combos, but that just serves as a way to increase the difficulty level in-game. And believe me, this game can get difficult if you’re not used to it.
Now, I’m sure the basics, and only real mechanics of this game, come as no surprise. After all, I did say it was exactly like DDR. So we’ll move away from that and look at the other game aspects; starting first with the look of FFR. There’s really only one screen in FFR: the main one. Its design is simple and does all it needs to, and doesn’t look bad doing it to boot. In the playing portion of the game you’ll find that you only have a black background, which for this game is perfect. I’ve run across a couple of colored screens when playing songs, but thankfully those are rare since the arrows kind of blend into them.
The only other real art aspects are the arrows themselves and the small hud you have while playing a song. Both these things are what you would expect: colored arrows that are coded to keep you on beat, and a bar that goes from green to yellow to red when you start doing badly. Other than those things, the only other piece is the combo counter, which I actually do have a small complaint about. When playing a song, your streak of correct hits is displayed above where the arrows cross, and this gets in the way of seeing what’s coming next. But thankfully the obstruction isn’t on a large scale, so it won’t mess with you too much.
On to the songs you have to play to; there are several genres of music to choose from and each one contains at least 50 songs. Other sections have over 100. You can even save up credits (if you create an account) to unlock more songs, so there’s no shortage of music in this game, and decent music at that. I found several songs that I’ve enjoyed listening to and have played repeatedly just to hear them again. The leveling of songs is strange in my opinion, since levels range from one to ninety-five, but at least you’ll feel like you’re improving when you’re progressively going up one number at a time.
All in all FFR gets a good grade from me for being something I enjoy putting my spare time into. So if you’ve got a couple of minutes to do nothing and just want something to distract you, I’d give FFR a try, if your fingers got some groove that is.
Flash Flash Revolution taps in at 4.5 GiN Gems out of 5!