Games Online Review

Do you want to dance? Do you want to get fit? Why don’t you do both at the same time with Dance Central?

And the good news is that Dance Central 2 is even better.

Dance Central is a music video game for the Xbox 360 that uses the Kinect motion peripheral. This means that you can control the whole game using gestures, including body movements and voice. No remote control or cables needed!

When you play the game, you follow a series of dance moves performed by avatars on the screen, and there are also “flash cards” on the screen to help you. The moves range from a simple shuffle step to an advanced series of upper body motions. As you dance, your body movements are tracked by Kinect to give you a score.

And it doesn’t just track your feet. It has full body tracking including your feet, twisting of your joints, and noise recognition such as clapping or snapping your fingers. It also takes pictures of you and plays some of them fast-forward mode, which is quite amusing.

There are five modes in this game:

Break it Down: If you are a beginner, or if you don’t have dancing skills, this practice mode helps you to learn more advanced dance moves in a step-by-step process. It allows you to practice each move separately so you can master the moves.

Performance: You can dance alone, with your aim being to score as high as you can.

Workout: This is similar to performing on your own, but as the name suggests, it focuses on fitness, so your workout time and the number of calories you burn are also tracked. You can dance and exercise at the same time!

Dance Battle: This involves a competition or battle between two players, and the player with the highest score wins.

Challenge: After you have got at least four stars in all the songs in a difficult category, you unlock a challenge based on the level of difficulty. The game is made more challenging by mixing sections from four or five songs so that the dance moves are also mixed.

There are dance routines for everyone, whether you are a beginner or an expert. But be warned: it’s tracking is highly accurate, so unless you know what you are doing, there is a learning curve.

Dance Central 2

The original Dance Central is great fun, so why is Dance Central 2 even better?

Well, if you’ve played the game before, or read the reviews, you’ll know that there were some criticisms of the original game. So let’s see how Dance Central 2 is even more fun.

The original game has no story/career mode in it, it just had a list of songs organized by difficulty level. Dance Central 2 has a more fully featured story mode. The characters in the game all belong to distinct dance crews, each dressed in wildly different costumes. So as you play the game, you travel through the world of underground dance crews, and work your way up the ranks of the best-known dancers in the world.

In the original game, you have to keep changing from player 1 to player 2 which is rather a nuisance, and if player 2 watches what player 1 is doing, player 2 will almost always win. Not fair! In Dance Central 2 you can now play (or dance) simultaneously, and player 2 can even drop in or out of the song at any time. So Dance Central 2 is not only more fair, it’s also a more social game.

Some people feel that the original game does not have as much content as other rhythm games. In Dance Central 2 there are more than 40 new dance hits and classics, and you can also import all your songs from the first game into it. So you’re actually doubling the list of songs in Dance Central 2 right from the start!

Dance Central 2 has a revamped tutorial mode, meaning that you can take a quick peek at a song’s choreography while choosing it from the song list, and you can also navigate all the menus with your voice.

In addition, you can get detailed feedback on your dance skills.

So, what’s the verdict?

Dance Central 2 is a stylish game with incredibly fun dance moves. But it’s also satisfying, because you know that the game is tracking your whole body accurately, so when you master a routine, you really feel that you have done well!

So all in all, it’s well worth the investment! The party never stops. Have fun!