Saturday Night Fever

A lot of characters have starred in rhythm games who probably shouldn't have. Alvin and the Chipmunks for instance, and Hannah Montana. So you can't really begrudge Player X for making a rhythm game out of something a bit more obviously suited to a dance game - like '70s disco flick Saturday Night Fever.

Except we can begrudge them for making some bits of Saturday Night Fever so tediously difficult - such as learning new dance moves. These need to be bought with preciously earned Disco Points earned by dancing in clubs, but then if you mess up doing them, you need to pay for them again.

Unfortunately, the sequence you need to learn only appears on the screen for a few seconds just before you need to tap it in. So unless you can very quickly memorise up, down, left, right, left and press them in time to music first time, you find yourself buying a lot of dance moves more than once.

As well as buying dance moves from the Dance Studio, there are other places you can visit as John Travolta character Tony. At Tony's apartment you can view the trophies you've won by completing achievements in the game. At the Clothes Shop you can change Tony's clothes so he looks even cheesier when dancing, if that's possible.

As far as the actual game goes though, it all takes place in the Subway where you can reach various clubs in different parts of the city. Each of these disco clubs houses three different competitions - there's Beat the Track, Freestyle and The Challenge.

Each of these competitions is different, but none is particularly unique to rhythm games. Beat the Track has you pressing up, down, left or right when their icons light up and Freestyle is similar but you use the dance moves you've bought instead - still pressing the appropriate buttons in time to the music. The Challenge meanwhile has you watching a dance 'pro' then memorising and copying their moves.

They're not unique and they're not done particularly well either. For instance, Tony's big flailing body slightly blocks your view of the lights that appear on the dance floor to tell you which button you need to press next. As a result, instead of arrows falling fluidly down the screen, it all feels like a big of a clumsy, frantic button-pushing mess.

Likewise for Freestyle. The problem here is that you need to have memorised the dance moves you've bought before starting because there's no way of viewing them mid-dance. Try to on the pause menu and the dance is reset. We're not sure exactly why - perhaps it would make it too easy. But rather that than as tough as it is.

Finally, The Challenge is just a fairly dull and difficult memory game. You watch another dancer do the moves, then copy, then watch, then copy and so on until the end when - unless you're particularly good at memorising long lists of variants on up, down, left and right - you'll get a fairly average end score.

The game packs in a bit of a story. At the start you get Stephanie telling Tony she doesn't want to be with him until he sorts out his life, then you meet various characters at the different dance clubs you unlock.

The only thing likely to keep you playing are the unlockables and winning various trophies, which at least bulks out the basic experience. Just as well because the rhythm game alone wouldn't be worth paying your pennies for. As it is, Saturday Night Fever is nowhere near as slick a mover as Travolta - in fact, a dance floor at a Blackpool ballroom packed with OAPs would probably be more fun.