Just Dance 3, the latest instalment in the popular Just Dance series for the Wii, has arrived on Xbox to be used with Kinect. Kinect and dance games are a match made in heaven so it was only natural for Just Dance to come to Xbox at last. So, how are your dancing skills?
The other heavy-hitting dance game on Kinect is Dance Central so comparisons are inevitable. Just Dance 3 has a colourful, quirky cartoon-look to its dance stages and simple menus. The dancers and stages aren’t the glitzy, polished 3D models of Dance Central, they’re video-captures, flattened almost comic-book characters. Their moves therefore look a lot smoother and more professional, less clunky than in Dance Central. It also has a way of setting you at ease when you play as it’s less intimidating to dance with a character in a silly bouncing wig than to a sleek and stylish up-and-coming hip hop dancer glaring disapprovingly at you behind expensive sunglasses.
Just Dance 3 has the all-important qualities necessary for a game of its type: accessibility and fun. It’s no problem to just jump straight in and dance, after all that’s what the game urges you to do with its blatantly obvious title. Most importantly, the song selection is wide-ranging with most genres given fair play and the choreography is easily picked up.
The format of the game hasn’t really changed from its Wii versions. The characters dance but instead of scrolling up the side, previews of moves scroll along the bottom. Everything looks beautiful in HD as well. The characters are particularly fun to look at with their ridiculous costumes (massive feather headdresses, zoot suits, luminous body paint, voluminous tutus, etc). The scoring is quite forgiving as well with the game tracking your whole body, but really only paying attention to your arms. Well, when I was playing it anyway. It didn’t care that I didn’t drop down completely on songs like Beautiful Liar which is just as well because at that point I’d been playing for about an hour and had I dropped down to the floor I would have taken a nap.
This game is best enjoyed with friends, with up to four people able to dance at once (if you have space). The game doesn’t mind people dropping in and out either and seems to do quite well with tracking multiple people, although that doesn’t stop you potentially bashing people in the face by accident. Some routines have specific multiplayer choreography, but the majority of them have just one dancer on screen that everyone follows. The multiplayer choreographies are pretty funny to play, especially when you have to get into appropriate poses to score.
Completing dances well earns you ‘mojo’ which unlocks bonuses like extra songs. It’s nice that the game gives you something to work towards; otherwise it’s mostly just dancing like a wannabe in your living room. The best kind of dancing! You can try and dance to workout as well with ‘Just Sweat’ mode, which gives you a ‘sweat’ score, and helpfully tells you an equivalent amount of exercise you’ve just completed.
To spice things up a little bit, there is the Just Create mode which lets you… ‘just create’ your own choreography! You basically film a little routine, and your stick-person representative will dance it out on screen for anyone to follow. Routines can be uploaded to and downloaded from the community. Live out your choreographer dreams, or see how someone else wants you to move!
There’s a rudimentary shop as well if you feel like purchasing extra songs for 240 MS points each. At the time of writing this review, there are only three songs available but with one of them being Fame, hilarity is sure to ensue if you decide to spend your money. I’ll hold off judgement on the shop for now because it seems likely that more is going to come our way.
If you get this game, definitely try out the ridiculous ridiculously amazing Spectronizer, a Japanese Super Sentai theme song. With four rangers, if you can fit that many people in your game space!
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