First off, the game comes with this neat Dance Pad, without raising the price above $50. I've never been a fan of these fold-up style pads, I would rather have the metal floor. The primary reason is because these pads still have a tendancy to kind of shuffle around while you dance on it. It's not too bad of a problem, but every once and a while it's annoying to look down and realize that the pad's been turned clockwise a little bit.

The arrows on the pad have giant sensitivity regions, so you'll never have to worry about stepping exactly on an arrow. All that black space around the arrow should work. By now I expect the DDR crew knows how to make good Dance Pads and this proves it. No complaints here.

DDR: Mario Mix is a tad different from from normal DDR games in that it has a story to it. Yes, you can go play the songs individually from a standard spinning list, but to unlock them there you first have to do the story mode. Story mode seems to borrow character animations straight from some of the latest Mario Party games. Which is good and bad. The story is kind of cute and funny but completely pointless. You follow Toad around who talks for you every step of the way (because apparently Mario can'ts speak for himself?) and you continually run into conflicts. "Oh no, there's Bullet Bills shooting at us! Let's dance!" or "Ah! It's an avalanche! Let's dance!" Yeah, pretty pointless. You'll beat that in about an hour, but you'll have to do it a couple more times on other difficulties to unlock songs you haven't heard before.

You should know how DDR games work by now. Just press on the arrows when they align with the beat. The difficulty of this game is about right for everyone, except DDR freaks. (You know who you are. Your ridiculous feet don't belong here) Easy mode is just way too easy. Basically each song requires you to press about 10 arrows total, which are all strictly left and right arrows only. Normal is still easy. Hard is getting more difficult. Very Hard is about right, and Super Hard is certainly quite the challenge. It has a nice learning curve because the last song of Normal mode is about the difficulty of a Very Hard mode song. So instead of switching difficulties completely, it's more of a spiral, or learning curve, into other difficulties.

Story mode has you dancing off against various other characters such as Waluigi.
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The cool thing about this game (and also hard) is "mush mode". This is automatically on during story mode. Instead of only stepping on arrows, you'll also be stepping on Goombas, Koopa Troopers, Bloopers, Bullet Bills, and even coins. Some of these will move faster than arrows, which can throw in a little bit of a curve ball into stepping on arrows. These only get annoying on really hard difficulties. Everything else makes them a nice challenge. A neat idea too.

There's a large handful of mini-games to play, such as this "Wack-a-Goomba".
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There's a handfull of mini-games to explore as well. Some are funny, some are lame, but it's a neat addition. One of them has you running as fast as you can then jumping up to the top of the classic Mario Flagpole before the castle. Another has you dodging boulders. It's kind of neat.

The most important thing to a dancing game is the music. I'd have to say I enjoy the selection of songs they put in this game. The majority of them are techno remixes of Mario songs, while the rest are popular (and not so popular songs). They definitely did not hold back with making these as techo/rave as they possibly could. Seriously - it's totally Japanese happy Rave style sounds and beats.

There's some good songs like remixes from Super Mario Bros 1, 2, 3, Super Mario World, Dr. Mario, Mario Kart, etc. And some odd choices like remixes to "Pomp and Circumstance", "Tritsch Trasch Polka", "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star", and some Carmen song..

They also seemed to pick some weird songs to remix from Mario games. There's a Mario Party 5 remix, Ms. Mowz's theme From Paper Mario, and a few other odd choices. I certainly could have thought of many other Mario songs more classic and worth remixing like some Yoshi stuff, or perhaps Mario Sunshine or the Invincibility theme. Oh well. The good news is that there's only a couple stinkers and all the other remixes are really well done, and some are even worthy of putting on your iPod.

This game doesn't really bring anything new to the table of DDR, besides interesting 3D backrounds, a story mode, and different objects to step on. If you've never really gotten into DDR before and tend to enjoy Mario as a character - this is worth checking out. It's fun. They did some nice work on this game.

Verdict: Not bad at all.