Dance Central (Xbox 360) > Reviews (10)

Microsoft launches the Kinect in a sea of uncertainty and enlists the Rhythm game gurus at Harmonix to manufacture its only sure-fire hit. Does Dance Central end up as planned?

The Story

Rhythm games always were an exciting sight at the arcades but they didn’t really infiltrate our homes until Harmonix tweaked the idea and created the household name of Guitar Hero. This catapulted titles bundled with plastic instruments to astronomical sale numbers, but had little effect to the dancing sub-genre of rhythm games.

Franchises like Dance Dance Revolutionwere popular, especially in Japan, but still didn’t come close to behemoths like Rock Band. The problem is that, as impossibly different a 5-button plastic guitar is to the real thing, games using it succeeded in making you feel like a rock star.

DDR on the other hand, for all its dance-mats and variations, doesn’t really have anything to do with actual dancing, at least gameplay-wise: your avatar might be dancing to a catchy tune, but all you are doing is hitting the appropriate buttons at the right time.

Just Dance is a bit better with keeping up the conceit but it still is heavily dependent on your imagination and mentality in order to be anything more than a flimsy excuse to shake your booty: The game might track the Wii Remote, but that only ensures about 15% of your body is moving correctly; you are pretty much free to cheat and put as much style & effort into it as you want.

So developers Harmonix come along, masters at getting neat concepts to connect with mainstream audiences, and promise Dance Central will make you feel like a professional dancer, like you’re taking proper dance classes during the day and tearing it down at clubs during the night.. And that it does indeed, for the most part.

The Gameplay

The whole experience does feel like taking a dance class: Before tackling a song proper, it’s recommended that you Break It Down. In this mode, the choreographer splits the routine up into a couple of parts and introduces all the fancy moves you’ll be performing.

If you are familiar with a move, you can perform it alongside the spotlight dancer and move straight to the next one. If you don’t quite have it, you can keep working at it, until you get it right three times. The choreographer becomes increasingly helpful if he sees you having trouble, by keeping up the count and utilizing keywords to help you keep track of what you are supposed to do.

Incidentally, keywords are paramount in getting a routine down in real life, so it’s a disappointing oversight that there is no option to turn them on permanently, even if there do exist a few practice perks you’re unlikely to find in an actual classroom:

The music seamlessly rewinds to the proper cue each time you retry a move, something that does wonders for your auditory / muscle memory, and you are also able to see and perform the moves in slow-motion.

This is pretty helpful because, while Dance Central doesn’t feature moves that are too fast to understand what is happening, there will be times where you’ll be failing without realising exactly why, even with the red outline that tries to highlight the offending parts of your body.

Slow-mo allows you to see each move as a whole and realise that although one might, say, focus on the arms, you are are also supposed to position your legs in a specific way too.

But the biggest helping hand has to be the flashcards. While some people have a gift for remembering how the moves link up, most have quite a bit of trouble and this is where the hours from learning to successfully performing a fresh varied choreography in real life, start to pile up.

This is where the flashcards come in and reliably get you from an easy break-down to a five star performance on hard in under an hour. And since the training is well made, you’ll probably be having fun the whole time; frustration is kept to a minimum.

In fact, one of the most enjoyable moments in the game is when an intimidating new card appears that has your eyes widen in a “how-am-I-ever-going-to-pull-that-off” way, only for you to start nailing it a few tries later.

After you’ve proven your mastery over a particular song by excelling in its Perform mode, you are treated to the No Flashcards mode variation, where, predictably, flashcards fail to make an appearance. This is where your memorization skills are put to the test, but you still have the spotlight dancer to tip you off, so it’s not too bad; it would be nice if there were an additional Lead Dancer, where you play with your back turned towards the television.

I understand programming it wouldn’t be as easy for Harmonix as it might sound, but this would be the ultimate mode for hardcore players and certainly more welcome than the only other extra we get, Workout Mode. This simply adds a timer & calorie counter at the top left of the screen and is nothing but a cheap way to entice the people who will only “exercise” on machines that churn out numbers with little scientific basis and “inform” you of how much fat you’ve supposedly burned.

The Multiplayer

We have a similarly blatant ploy with the multiplayer features: Dance Central only tracks one player at a time but the marketing team proudly touts you can have backup dancers. However, this is as true here as it is for every game in existence, since your friends aren’t scored, or affect the gameplay in any way.

I mean, I always imagine having a crowd cheering me on when I am up late coding, “_The Social Network_”-style, but that doesn’t mean Notepad++ has multiplayer support.

Still, Dance Central does have its Dance Battle mode, where two players compete against each other by taking turns dancing a single track. I’d like to describe this as a valiant effort to overcome the Kinect’s ridiculous real estate requirements, but there are no two ways about it: You really need to have head-to-head multiplayer action in a game with this much party play potential.

Especially since Harmonix didn’t take the effort to calculate a clever system for the Dance-Off concept: The players have to dance to the same track and, even if they can opt to perform it in different difficulties, there isn’t a handicapping system in place.

There really should have been a way to, say, have one player try the relatively complex Maneater while the other goes for the simpler Pon de Replay on medium. Should the first player get 75% of the moves correctly, the second player can win it if he gets more than 95% on his much easier routine.

Of course, it’s hard to hold too much of a grudge against Harmonix for botching the multiplayer, since you do get the feeling they were trying the best to work against the limitations of the mysterious piece of hardware that is the Kinect.

The Kinect

The Kinect is fascinating technology, but it’s still early days and Harmonix were hard at work trying to create a game that highlights its strengths while concealing its weaknesses. It’s pretty apparent, for example, that each routine was created with exactly that philosophy in mind.

They are all quite accomplished, featuring a couple of signature moves each and a unique finishing pose. But it doesn’t take long to notice that they focus on small sideways movements and that you rarely, if ever, move forwards or backwards.

The Kinect also doesn’t track fingers, doesn’t really know what you’re doing when you move your arms in front of your body and it, for some weird reason, has problems understanding what exactly you’re doing with your midsection.

So, while Dance Central tries hard and is a relatively authentic experience for the most part, there are times when you really have to suspend your disbelief and play along, as you would be doing in Just Dance. At least, Harmonix realises it’s not your fault the Kinect can’t track you with sufficient detail at this point, so the scoring system is rather forgiving and usually hands out the points when it’s unsure of your movements.

By design, things real choreographers obsess over, like proper posturing, don’t have much of an impact. You are free to look at your feet as much as you want and facial expressions never come into play.

Of course, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. As previously mentioned, Just Dance requires far less from the player but that hasn’t stopped millions from having a blast with it. On the contrary, the fact that you don’t have to be a pro to, well, just dance has definitely worked in its favour.

It’s all about finding the right balance between “simulation” and “gimmicky game” and, although it would be nice if Dance Central could use the Kinect’s falsely advertised messianic potential to run the full gamut, it does rest in a pretty enjoyable spot for amateurs and pros alike.

The Routines

Dance Central features 4 to 5 songs for each of the seven levels of choreography complexity, with a medley topping off each level and even a marathon remix for when you’ve conquered everything.

All the individual songs are available from the get-go, but the medleys, or challenges, unlock once you’ve succeeded in the relevant tracks.

Each song only has one routine, which is a bit of a let-down. Well, technically, each track has its proper routine which appears on hard, and increasingly simplified versions of it for the medium and easy performances, where some complex moves never appear and are instead replaced with more counts of the simpler ones, but it’s still disappointing we don’t get any more meaningful variations; especially for the challenges which were a prime opportunity to shake things up and could have easily offered alternate versions simply by placing the mixed songs in different order.

What would have been really awesome though, was an Endless Playlist type of mode, where the songs & moves would link up randomly and up to eternity. That would have been a great mode for a Workout too, but, once again, we see Harmonix for going for quality over quantity.

There is a healthy selection of different moves though, with even the most complex ones being very feasible; you don’t have backflips or headstands, naturally, and every song is choreographed to keep pretty much the same rhythm. Each card lasts four counts and you usually mirror your movement on both sides, unless you see a Double symbol, when you perform the same move for the last two counts.

However, that’s not to say Dance Central doesn’t offer a challenge: Some moves have you hitting the floor, more complex routines change up moves at such a pace you’ll have to memorize transitions and even simpler songs can require a fair amount of stamina... So it does manage to capture the feeling

, if not the speed, of the choreographies you might see in music videos. Even so, a Double-speed mode would have been more than welcome.

Sometimes, there’s also the challenge of figuring out exactly what the Kinect wants to see. Usually, it likes having a clear view of all your limbs, so if a move is giving you trouble, you are probably supposed to exaggerate the range of your movements, even if it looks clumsier and not much like what the spotlight dancer is doing.

The song list includes 32 songs and if you hit dance clubs every now and again, you’ll be familiar with most of them. It is a relatively short list and you’ll certainly find a lot of your favourites missing, but everything included is a lot of fun to dance to, there is a fair amount of variety and mastering the whole package should take over 20 hours of gameplay.

Still, some omissions are pretty cheap: For example, although Lady Gaga bookends the show, they are saving her biggest hit for a later date. It’s pretty clear that Downloadable Content will certainly play a big part in Dance Central and Harmonix has proven it’s gotten the hang of it, with Rock Band. It has started off strong here too, but there are some rookie mistakes, such as the new songs not listing their routine’s complexity.

This is quite important because, while there will be some songs you’d love to dance to no matter what, for most you’ll only be willing to pay extra if they seem to have an intriguing choreography.

The Presentation

This is a pretty weird oversight too since Dance Central is very polished in general, with plenty of stat-tracking, humourous messages and quirky dancers in flamboyant outfits. Even the flashcards themselves are rather clever, featuring clean drawings & fancy, memorable names.

It is a bit disappointing, though, that you can’t create your own avatar or mix-and-match outfits, little things that always are nice secondary features to have. At the very least, if we are only going to get 8 dancers with set outfits, Harmonix should have made sure there was no “clipping” whatsoever.

Also, although the “Dance Class” theme holds up, the clubbing scene is all but forgotten. Can’t say it’s surprising though, since a story in this kind of game is of tertiary importance and Harmonix didn’t even have enough time to straighten out the multiplayer.

Some thought did go into scrolling through menus Kinect-Style, but it still is a bit awkward; in fact, the whole navigation system is kinda tricky, but I am afraid this will always be the case with controller-free interfaces. At least, you are permitted to use the controller if you don’t feel like fumbling about.

Truer to Harmonix’s form, Dance Central excels at getting across when you are failing during gameplay and when you are truly bringing it. Each song also features a Freestyle section, where you get the freedom to bust your own moves. You don’t have to be in rhythm, you don’t have to be in the same genre, you don’t even have to be dancing: It’s just an excuse to take a break from the rigid choreography and simply have fun.

Of course, the whole package can be seen as an excuse to simply have fun, even if hardware issues and time constraints didn’t allow for it to reach its full potential.

Overall

Even though Dance Central is an easy act to follow, it still is very recommendable.

Randomized routines, proper Dance-Offs, customizable dancers, all these features are no-brainers and their absence here is hurtful, but you can tell they were cut to make sure Dance Central worked and that it worked in time for Kinect’s launch. That’s more that can be said for most of the other launch titles.

What is in there is quite polished and the hardware’s shortcomings are usually well-masked. It’s not as much of a party game as Rock Band or Just Dance, but it’s very fun for one or two players at a time and it has lasting appeal. It’s not a system seller by itself but, if you do have the Kinect, you should definitely pick it up.

Precise Score: 8.0/10