Dance Central Review

The video game dancing genre is not new to me, having played games like Dance Dance Revolution and Just Dance. But when I picked up Dance Central for the Xbox 360, I was certainly not prepared for the ridiculous number of hours that I put into playing this game, simply because it was just that much fun to play. Of course, the unique selling point of Dance Central is that because it uses Kinect, any peripherals or dance mats that would be required on other games or consoles instantly go flying out the window. You just stand in front of the screen, and dance to your heart’s content.

Dance Central firstly has a very impressive track list, with songs from Rhianna, Lady Gaga, Kylie, Benny Benassi, Pitbull and many more, there is at least one song on there that will make you get up and dance, with more songs being available through DLC. The second positive thing about the game is that you don’t follow arrows or attempt to simply mime the on-screen character – you actually have to match the exact body  movements and poses in order to rank up your score.

Each song has a set of professionally choreographed moves, and it’s up to you to pull off these moves correctly. As the song plays, flashcards scroll up on the right side of the screen indicating what the current dance move is, and what’s coming up next. Once you’ve memorized what each move is, you can easily pull them off just by glancing at the name of the move. The on-screen character will also pull off the move at the same time as you do, so as long as you are able to mirror the dancer, you’ll rack up some high points. It’s worth mentioning that a lot of the game’s choreography is good enough to pull off if you were to hear the song in a club, provided of course you can remember all the moves.  The on-screen dancer also serves as visual feedback on how accurate your dancing is – if there is a particular part of your body that you’re not moving correctly, that part will flash red on the dancer, indicating which arm or a leg you need to pay attention to. As you pull off the dance moves correctly, an expanding circle around your dancer’s feet will let you know who well you are doing, scoring you from “Nice” all the way to “Flawless”. You’ll need these scorings to earn stars for each song and improve your overall ranking in the game. The stars are also essential to unlock the medium and hard difficulty settings for each song, as well as the ‘Song Challenges’, which are a mashup of four or five songs along with their dance routines.

In an effort to keep things simple, Dance Central offers just three modes of gameplay for any song you select. ‘Break it Down’ is a tutorial mode for the song and will walk you through the song’s various dance moves depending on the difficulty you select. If you get the dance move correct on the first try, you immediately move on to the next one – if you get it wrong, you will need to pull it off three times in a row to move on. If you still get it wrong, the game then slows the song down considerably, and the game’s narrator counts you in time to the beat and tells prompts you through the move until you get it right. This is a great feature for anyone who wants to learn the basics of the game, as well as master some of the more complicated moves that crop  up on the Hard difficulty setting. ‘Perform It’ has you going through the entire dance routine, with an opportunity to ‘freestyle’ in the middle as the Kinect take a series of photos and plays them back quickly for an instant gag filler. Lastly the ‘Dance Battle’ mode allows two players to perform a song in turns, by jumping in and out when prompted, with individual scores given at the end.

Graphically the game does very well, with the on-screen dancers looking sharp and responsive, and with very fluid body movements. The various venues are also quite detailed although a lot of your attention will tend to be only on the dancers once the game begins. Moving around the game’s menus and selection screens is as simple as extending your right hand and moving it up or down to scroll, and swiping to the left to select. The dancers’ brief audio snippets before and after a performance can be entertaining at first, but might bore you after a number of repetitions. Still, the stellar song list here is what steals the show, with plenty of tracks to choose from, sorted by difficulty to make selection easier.

Dance Central is the first true dance game that I’ve seen that not only gives you a great workout, but also actually encourages people to get up and join in with you. It’s the game to get if you want to demonstrate just how great the Kinect can be, and there’s certainly no shame is shaking your boogie to Poker Face or Pon De Replay.