The first Just Dance was nothing short of a smash hit. It was a game that did a great job catering to the Wii audience, in spite of the gripes I had from a hardcore gamer perspective; which wouldn’t matter to the vast majority of people who would play or buy this game in the first place. To be fair, once I stopped thinking about the game as a hardcore game reviewer and started thinking about it as just someone wanting to play a dance game with others, the original was a lot of fun.
Yesterday evening, my girlfriend went to pick up her copy of Just Dance 2, which might be her most anticipated game of the year. After a long weekend of Just Dance 1 madness with her, my brother, my cousins and I, my brother and I decided to go half on our own copy as well.
I have yet to crack open the game, but I have played a pre-release build at Fan Expo. From my time with it there, it’s easy for me to say that fans of the first game will be pleased with additions and tweaks to the game. Just Dance 2 features over 40 new songs; the vast majority of them being originals along with a handful of covers. There were covers in the first game as well, so it’s not necessarily outrage-worthy. Based on what I’ve seen of the set list, it’s a pretty solid mix of music to dance to spanning a number of genres and decades. The game supports downloadable songs as well, which could potentially extend the life of the game greatly if Ubisoft makes a lot of songs available.
Each song has a unique dance routine to go with it, and based on the few I played at Fan Expo, they were really well done. The way the choreography is structured may not be 100% transferable to the dance floor, but the repetition of the moves in each song allow for players to pick up the routine faster. One of the tweaks my girlfriend noted immediately was that the hand your controller was supposed to be in was coloured differently on the character you were to follow. This helps greatly in coordinating your dance moves.
As someone who had gripes with how the game tracked your movements, I’m not sure if they necessarily made things better. It doesn’t support Wii Motion Plus, so it’s not like the hardware got any better at tracking your motions. What I did notice though, was that I was getting a lot fewer missed steps than in the first game. I’m not sure if I got better or the game in general was more lenient to your inputs, but I’m going to guess the latter is at work. For the sake of my dignity, I will take it. I know there will be gamers that will blindly accuse the game’s tracking of being random, but my girlfriend was consistently kicking my butt every time by roughly the same margin across every song we played, which indicates that there is a consistency to the tracking. Still, if you’re in the market for a more ‘precise’ or ‘difficult’ experience, own an XBOX 360 and are willing to drop $150 before tax on a Kinect, Dance Central may be more up your alley.
For those anxiously awaiting the release of Just Dance 2 though (and I know there are a lot of you), your time is now. I expect this to be a step in the right direction for the series, though I won’t know for sure till I put some more time into it. Stay tuned to In Third Person for a review soon.
In Third Person 